“Probably,” I said. I had to remind myself that this wasn’t a done deal. These were just warning signs. A correction wouldn’t happen until it happened. If I didn’t change anything else, things might still heal. But not without terrible scars.

“I need to do it again, Katie,” I told her. “I need to do it one last time, but I don’t know how.”

We were on a country road now. A car approached, speeding in the opposite direction. I thought of a math problem. I thought of the moment when two cars moving in opposite directions met. I watched it as it approached, my hands still tight on the wheel, then felt the blast of wind as it passed just a few feet from us. I tracked it in the rearview mirror until it was gone. Finally, I breathed out, not realizing I had been holding my breath.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Katie said, knowing what I was thinking even before I did.

“I’ll try not to,” was the best I could say. Because every door in front of me had a tiger behind it now.

I drove home in silence after I dropped Katie off, but as I pulled up to my house, the silence was pierced by angry metal. Hunter was up in his room, playing his guitar, and it was blasting from his window. Nothing unusual about that . . . until I realized what song he was playing.

Once inside, I went straight up to his room and pushed open his door. His amp was turned up to earsplitting volume, and he was gripping the neck of his guitar with such force as he switched between chords that his fingertips were bleeding. There was something odd about the blood on his fingertips, but I couldn’t focus on that right now. I had to focus on Hunter, who was staring off at nothing, and his eyes—they were pinpricks. I could barely see any pupil in there at all.

“Hunter!” I yelled, but still he played. I turned the amp down. “Hunter!”

Finally he looked at me and blinked like he was coming out of a trance—but even with the volume down, his hands kept moving.

“I can’t stop playing,” he said. “I can’t stop playing this song . . .”

“Put down the guitar, Hunter,” I told him, like I was talking him off a ledge. I could see that he wanted to, but he kept on tormenting himself with the tune.

“What is it, Ashley? What is this song? Why can’t I get it out of my head?”

“It’s called ‘Come As You Were,’” I told him. “It’s by a band called Konniption.”

That just made him grimace as if I had stabbed him. “Who are they? I never heard of them.”

“You’ve never heard of them because they don’t exist.”