“I—” He stumbled and looked at his drink. The beacon, the connection to something, that lack of openness I’d sensed before, turned on behind his eyes, and I felt him move away from me. “Can we talk about Carey another time?”

There was so much misery radiating from his voice that I didn’t think he could possibly contain it. I felt clumsy, beastly, even, for scratching such an obviously gaping wound. I didn’t want to imagine him doing what the people at Max’s party had implied—dismantling her body—or hurting her, like Cady had suggested—and inadvertently shook my head to dislodge the thought.

“Is that okay?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” I said, and diverted my gaze to the near-black planks of the floor. “I didn’t mean to shake my head, I’m so tired, I’m—I’m doing the opposite of what I mean,” I said, shifting my weight around, breaking the tension. As I moved, he caught sight of the still-healing scab on my calf. The glue had mostly peeled off.

“What happened there?” He grazed it with his fingertips, and a liquid blush traveled to and from the center of my body.

“I tried to climb the ladder in the barn, but it collapsed under my weight.”

He looked confused for a second. “The old barn?”

“Yeah. It’s okay.”

Suddenly his hands were wrapping around my calf, thumbs on each side of the ragged pink and brown skin. He leaned forward, pressed his forehead to my calf, and apologized.

“I’m so sorry. It was thoughtless and cruel. I can be—I can be closed off,” he said, breathing into the skin of my leg.

I could feel the tide of his breath forming and receding. It was so surprising—and instantaneously erotic, like completing a circuit—that I froze, closing my eyes, unsure of what to do, wanting desperately to remain completely still, to stay with it, with him, whatever he was.

But then he must have looked up. “Are you upset with me?” he asked.

“No,” I breathed—and then I opened my eyes.

I wanted him, that night. Thinking about it even now makes me lovesick, stops me like a hand on my chest: the feeling of his skin on mine, of his breath moving across my leg.

Yet when my eyes flew open inside that black house, I saw only how black it was, and in a flash I was overcome by the physical act of repainting everything, of reupholstering all the furniture, of dyeing the lampshades and curtains. I saw only an act of grief that he was still inhabiting. My sense that he was spoken for was accurate—if not by a living person, then by a dead one.