I stand up quickly. My body feels like it belongs to someone else.

“Forget it.” I shouldn’t have come. I don’t know why I did. Everything is collapsing everywhere I turn. “Forget I said anything.”

Condor gets to his feet, too. “I’m trying to help you—”

I cut him off before he can finish. “I may be wrong about Frank Mitchell. But I’m not wrong about Kaycee. They wanted her out of the way, they knew she could expose them—”

“Who’s ‘they,’ Abby?” He looks at me like he’s afraid of me. “Optimal?” In his voice, I can hear how it sounds. In his eyes, I’m a shrunken reflection, desperate and small. “And Sheriff Kahn? And Misha? And all of Kaycee’s friends? And Brent?” He spits the name out like a curse.

“You don’t get it. You don’t know—Optimal owns everything in this town—it’s everywhere—”

“You don’t get it.” His voice cracks against a note of pain, and it touches a place deep inside me and suddenly I realize that the anger is just grief, just fear, just worry. “Fuck Kaycee Mitchell. Dead, alive, burning in hell, wherever she is. Fuck her. She ruined enough. Don’t let her ruin you, too. Don’t—”

I kiss him. Taking the words off his tongue with brute force. We knock a pile of books off the table, crash down to the chair and then onto the floor. We topple the lamp and it shatters on the ground, making the room go dark.

“You can’t fix yourself on me,” he says, undoing his belt. “You know that, right?”

“I’m not here to fix myself,” I say, pulling him closer.

Because maybe I can’t be fixed at all.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Knocking. Someone is at the door, knocking again and again.

I’m in my own bed, but the smell of Condor is everywhere and all over me.

More knocking.

My phone’s dead, and I have to find the microwave to read the time: 8:12. Only bad news comes this early.

I twitch open the blinds with two fingers and my heart stops. Sheriff Kahn is scowling at my door as if it’s been talking back. I can tell just from how he’s standing that he’s been there awhile.

The paintings are still sitting in my living room: each of them looks like something ripped from a body, like some horrible inner secret.

Kahn starts knocking again before I’ve shuffled one of them beneath the sofa.

“One minute.” Sweat sticks my hair to my forehead. I’m wearing the shirt I had on yesterday, but inside out. “One minute.” I shove the other two paintings under my bed.

I look for a lie, for an excuse, for something to say, but there’s nothing. One time I lost control of my car on Lake Shore Drive, and after a few seconds of panic, while my car was spinning over black ice toward the ditch, I landed on a moment of peace just like this one. The collision was inevitable. All I had to do was wait for it. It was almost a relief.