Mr. Barrett put his knife down, and looked at me. Was he wondering how honest he could be? Why I wanted to know all of a sudden? “She torched my car,” he said. “Doused it in gasoline, flicked a lit cigarette at it. It was inside the garage at the time.”

“Oh my god,” I said. “Why did she do that?”

He rubbed his beard. “She thought I was cheating on her.”

I laughed, but there wasn’t a lot of humor in it. “Were you?”

“No,” he said, laughing too. Then he stopped abruptly. “Hadassah was not a well woman.” The exact same words my mom used. “Whatever sickness Solomon has, I wouldn’t be surprised if he inherited it, you know? And she was raised in a very strict Orthodox Jewish community. Turned her back on all that, but it really messed her up.”

Sounded a lot like gaslighting to me, but I just said, “Wow.”

“I try to keep tabs on him, you know. Even though he pushed us away, I still care about the poor guy. I hear he’s not doing so well in school. How did he seem, the last time you saw him?”

“Tough to say,” I said, and I stopped myself, without really knowing why.

Mr. Barrett did care about Solomon, as far as I could tell. Wanted the best for him. So why did it feel wrong to share Solomon’s stories with him? The dinosaur city and the Refugee Princess? Even to say he was experiencing hallucinations, losing track of what’s real and what isn’t, felt like a betrayal. So all I said was “He’s pretty unhappy.”

“He’s lucky to have you,” he said. “Solomon needs something stable in his life. Something he can trust. You know how he’s prone to persecution fantasies.”

“Yeah,” I said, but the words made something click in my mind.

Persecution fantasies—my father had used the exact same phrase. Except how would Mr. Barrett know that? Solomon hadn’t developed those until pretty recently.

“Did you want a ham sandwich?”

“No, thanks,” I said. “Seems like you’ve got a system here. Everything in its proper place. Just enough. I should get going.”

“Did you want me to give a message to Connor?”

“Right,” I said. “Yes. Tell him I stopped by.”

“That’s all?” He grinned. I wondered if he knew that Connor and I were sleeping together. Or if he thought we were boyfriend and girlfriend. Or if he’d think less of me, if he knew we were just Friends with Benefits. There was something old-fashioned about Mr. Barrett, under all that scruffy, hip GQ silver-foxness, and I didn’t imagine he’d be super-open-minded about our arrangement.

So I stopped myself from saying, Tell him I can’t wait to feel his hot body pressed up against mine.

“No, that’s all,” I told him.