Ajay sat in the back seat of the car, idly playing with his phone. Beside him, Aprita was asleep, a balled-up sweater serving as a cushion between her and the window. In the front seats, his parents were listening to NPR.

Outside, the traffic stopped and started for no reason that he could see. On paper, Portland and Seattle were three hours apart, but that was only true if there were no other cars on the road. Today, that certainly wasn’t the case. And even though Portlanders complained about their traffic, Seattle’s was even worse.

Over the past few days, Ajay had cooked a few dishes in his aunt’s kitchen, patiently played board games with his cousins (all younger), and avoided Aprita’s attempts to ask him about Bridget. How could he explain what was happening? He didn’t know how to describe it to himself.

All the passion that had drawn him to Bridget had been revealed as something scarier, something that erased the boundary between imagination and reality. She had fallen so far into Swords and Shadows that she had decided to create a world where she herself was part of the books.

But thinking about Bridget made him feel anxious and sad. So now Ajay distracted himself by playing Candy Crush and Word Finder. He checked out the Onion and Bored Panda. Every now and then he would look up to see how much closer they were to Portland, and every time he was disappointed to realize how much longer it would be.

Finally, when he had exhausted every possible form of time waster, Ajay checked his Gmail account. Amid the junk mail were two personal emails. The sight of them made him feel the weirdest mix of feelings because of who they were from: Bridget Shepherd.

Already wincing, Ajay opened the first. It explained that she had discovered a code in “Bob’s” message. Reading the first paragraph was enough to make him want to kick and shout, to try to do something to release his anger and frustration at how her mental illness still had her in its grasp. A code. Good grief. Pretty soon she would be telling him that strangers were following her and her phone was being tapped. He powered off the phone and tried to mimic Aprita and sleep.

But sleep wouldn’t come. Ajay opened up her email again, read a little further. The police hadn’t believed her, which was a relief.

But at the bottom of the email, when she told him how she had solved it, it almost made a kind of sense.

Right, Ajay reminded himself. Sense. There was no way Bob was being held captive. He was on the verge of becoming just as bad as Bridget. Bridget, who had probably made the entire message up anyway and sent it to herself.