‘It’s our first night here! Don’t you think we ought to, you know, celebrate? I have a movie we can watch, or we can just catch up and talk—’ Liz was practically begging her. ‘Please? I know it’s been a really long time and maybe – maybe you’re just really feeling lost, and I want you to like it here. So let me help.’

I just want to go upstairs, call Shane, and spend all night talking. But if she said that out loud, it would sound like she was some girl who couldn’t exist without a boy, and wasn’t that what all this coming-to-MIT had been intended to prove? Pretty ridiculous to fail the first test, on the first day she was apart from him.

‘Sure,’ Claire said, and tried to force some cheer into her voice. She felt horrible, but it wasn’t Liz’s fault. Her former best friend was trying to fill the void, and the least Claire could do was let her.

Besides … she could call Shane later.

Elizabeth was, as it turned out, a movie fanatic, and six hours later, Claire finally begged off from the video assault and climbed the stairs, feeling more like a zombie than a survivor of the living-dead attack. Watching gory horror movies on the first night in a creaky old house, with a flaky roommate, was not nearly as much fun as it had been in the Glass House, surrounded by people she loved and trusted. That house had always seemed – and been, on some level – alive, and protective of them.

This one felt cold, alien, and utterly indifferent to her life or death, which made imagining the creaks and bangs to be serial killers intent on murder all too easy.

Claire made it up the steep climb, turned on the lights, and climbed in bed with her phone. She thought about shutting the lights off again, but in her sleep-deprived, overstimulated state, every shadow looked like a monster, and she thought she could see things moving at the corners of her eyes.

Better to leave them on.

She dialled Shane’s number and snuggled down in the pillows, warm and safe, finally, beneath the covers even if the mattress felt weirdly hard, and the sheets smelt of unfamiliar detergent.

His cell rang, and rang, and rang, and finally it went to voicemail.