I hesitated before replying. “I was a maid in a motel, the summer between high school and college.”

“In Florida?”

“Yeah. Horseshoe Beach, Florida. It’s on the Gulf. It’s very Gulf,” I said. “Everybody had tribal tattoos. That was the summer I worked with my mother.”

She was fired six weeks in for drinking on the job. After that I drove to work in her car every day alone, and returned to find the house empty. She would be out somewhere, with someone. The day I left for the Academy, I worked my shift and came back with my last paycheck. She wasn’t home. I signed the reverse, tucked it under a lamp, shouldered my duffel bag, and took the bus to the airport.

But I didn’t tell Tyler that.

He finished making our breakfast. I sat there, roiling in confusion, unsure of what to say. I was dying to ask about everything, to find out whether I was rational or irrational. I wanted to know about the lawsuit, the notebook, the film, the connection to Lee Lozano, but it had been made very clear that pressing him on Carey would only cause a rift between us, like when Marlin had accidentally printed her name. Every ounce of my curiosity about Carey was tempered by my dependence on him.

Still—it went that way after all. I read once about the noises our throats make when we are rehearsing a thought; we speak without speaking, and those around us hear us without doing so. It’s how, sometimes, you know exactly what someone is going to say—because they have already told you, with their eyes and their posture and the inaudible speech they’ve been rehearsing in their heads and passing imperceptibly through their vocal cords.

He handed me a mug of coffee. My fingers spread flat across the surface of it. He paused and peered at my fingertips.

“Have we met before?” he asked.

“Do you know who the president is?” I replied, holding my hand to his forehead.

“No, I mean, like, before this summer.” He held my hand and stared at it. “Last night you said I look the same.”

“Ohhh—I was dru-unk.” I grimaced. But—determined, against my better judgment, to pick away at Carey—I said it. “Well—I was in one of Carey’s shows.”

“What?” He turned to stone.

“My hand was, anyway.” I held out my left hand. “She cast my hand in a show at a gallery, while I was still in school, and I saw it, years later, in Paris. The show was called 72 HOURS. I was, like, hour forty-two or something. The skin was falling off, but I recognized my fingernails,” I said, rubbing my fingertips against each other to make a hard, rattled noise. “See? They have ridges. My mom has them, too.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that before?”