He knows what’s coming. Meggie rips into him. He lets her. There’s no point trying to talk to women when they get like this. He stands there and takes it all in. When she’s finally done, he doesn’t bother trying to defend himself. What’s the good of saying things? He’s so much better at saying things when there’s a script to keep him from deep water. There’s no script here.

Of course, he and Meggie will patch things up eventually. Old friends forgive old friends. Nothing is unforgivable. He’s wondering if this is untrue when a car comes into the meadow.

“Well,” Meggie says. “That’s my ride.”

She waits for him to speak and when he doesn’t, she says, “Good-bye, Will.”

“I’ll call you,” the demon lover says at last. “It’ll be okay, Meggie.”

“Sure,” Meggie says. She’s not really making much of an effort. “Call me.”

She gets into the back of the car. The demon lover bends over, waves at the window where she is sitting. She’s looking straight ahead. The driver’s window is down, and okay, here’s Ray again. Of course! He looks out of the window at the demon lover. He raises an eyebrow, smiles, waves with that hand again, need a ride?

The demon lover steps away from the car. Feels a sense of overwhelming disgust and dread. A cloud of blackness and horror comes over him, something he hasn’t felt in many, many years. He recognizes the feeling at once.

And that’s that. The car drives away with Meggie inside it. The demon lover stands in the field for some period of time, he is never sure how long. Long enough that he is sure he will never catch up with the car with Meggie in it. And he doesn’t.

There’s a storm coming in.

The thing is this: Meggie never turns up for the morning show in Tallahassee. The other girl, Juliet Adeyemi, does reappear, but nobody ever sees Meggie again. She just vanishes. Her body is never found. The demon lover is a prime suspect in her disappearance. Of course he is. But there is no proof. No evidence.

No one is ever charged.

And Ray? When the demon lover explains everything to the police, to the media, on talk shows, he tells the same story over and over again. I went to see my old friend Meggie. I met her lover, Ray. They left together. He drove the car. But no one else supports this story. There is not a single person who will admit that Ray exists. There is not a frame of video with Ray in it. Ray was never there at all, no matter how many times the demon lover explains what happened. They say, What did he look like? Can you describe him? And the demon lover says, He looked like me.

As he is waiting for the third or maybe the fourth time to be questioned by the police, the demon lover thinks about how one day they will make a movie about all of this. About Meggie. But of course he will be too old to play the demon lover.