Then—it was as though an avalanche had been triggered in my mind. Facts tumbled down the slopes in a rush:

Marlin’s, Jack’s, Jes’s, and Tyler’s studios were littered with pieces of Carey—the hexagons, the eyeballs, the film, the wax positives. Yet it seemed they could barely tolerate the mention of her name.

“There’s one work,” Charlie had said, “that could upgrade the market for her previous works quite significantly. They simply won’t give it up.”

“Everybody hated her,” Max whispered.

“It’s never been fun,” Marlin cried in her studio. “Why start now?”

“Other people didn’t matter to her,” Jack was saying, book in hand, that day on the lake. “She was kind of a dangerous person…anything could happen when she was around.”

I thought about Tyler’s face whenever her name came up, and Jes—possessive, angry Jes, needy with Tyler and nobody else. Her film that showed Carey as a sad, empty copy, and the way she snapped at me every time we spoke. Jes didn’t want me around. I wondered if she hadn’t wanted Carey around, either.

My next thoughts were like boulders, smashing against the floor of my chest. What if—what if Jes had something to do with Carey’s suicide? And what—what if all of this was about protecting her? Or what—what if Carey was still alive?

Then the car was pulling to a stop. Tyler’s arm reached over me, the hard meat of his biceps and forearm pressing against my chest—

Whatever happened, Tyler knew exactly what it was. I imagined he’d guessed my thoughts, and my face opened up in wide-eyed panic—

Until—

His hand hit the plastic handle. He unlocked the door and pushed it open.

“Home sweet home,” he said—and then he kissed my cheek.

*  *  *

I had one hand on my clavicle, like I always did when panic took over for reality, and then—as soon as I realized it—my lens changed. I ticked off a mental list: I was hungover, hungry, tired. I was obsessive; I was jealous; I was stressed. I was acting, as my ex-boyfriend George used to say, like a paranoid, insane person. I took a step back and tried to think it through a second time.

Jes was gruff, but people like us didn’t kill other people. Tyler was sad. Marlin was sensitive. Jack was preoccupied. None of them wanted to keep thinking or talking about Carey, and that was their right. The more I rationalized their behavior, the more my own thoughts seemed silly and irrational—as foolish and superficial and crassly speculative as the people at Max’s party.

Five minutes later I was at Tyler’s. Water boiling for coffee, eggs and bacon frying in a pan. I sat at his burnished black dining table, folding his black linen napkins into tiny swans.

“Where’d you learn how to do that?”