She didn’t reply.

“You’ve been crying,” I said.

There was something close to anger in her tone. “You’re so perceptive, Mickey.”

“Why have you been crying?”

Again she didn’t reply. She didn’t have to. The answer was obvious.

“You knew already,” I said. “But how? They just found his body. The media . . .” And then I saw it. “My God. That’s what Buck’s mother told you, didn’t she?”

“She knew who I was,” Ema said. “She found Buck’s e-mails to me. She knew what I meant to him. And what he meant to me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“She said that she didn’t want me to live not knowing the truth. Or thinking Buck had just carelessly broken my heart. But I don’t think that was it. I think she needed someone to confide in. So she made me swear never to tell.”

“And you agreed?”

Ema nodded. “I agreed.”

“And that’s why you didn’t tell me about it yesterday?”

“No,” Ema said. “That had nothing to do with it.”

“But you said . . . wait, what did Buck’s mother tell you exactly?”

“She talked about how Buck had felt all that pressure. Your buddy Troy added to it. Buck needed to get bigger and stronger. So, yes, he took steroids. A lot of them. And then we met online—and he started to change. But, like Jared said, he was still torn between his two worlds.”

I swallowed. “What happened to him, Ema? How did he die?”

“His brother, Randy.”

“He killed him?”

“In a sense,” Ema said. “Randy thinks he understands how these drugs work. He doesn’t. I don’t know if Buck had a bad reaction to them. I don’t know if he took too many of them accidentally. I don’t know if he took too many on purpose.”

“He overdosed?”

Her tears came freely now. “Yeah,” she said. “He overdosed. He was alone and he shot this stuff into his veins and . . .”

“But his body,” I said. “It was buried in the woods. If it was an overdose . . .”

“Think about it, Mickey.”

I tried, but it wasn’t coming to me.

“The NFL draft was coming up,” Ema said. “Randy was already secretly fighting a positive steroid test. If this came out, if they found out Buck had overdosed because of Randy . . .”

I shook my head. My eyes went wide. “Parents would never do that.”

“You don’t get it.”

“What?”