But I hadn’t imagined this disappointment, as fast and chaotic as the water racing underneath us, at finding...nothing. No clue, no hint, no trace of Cole. I should have known, shouldn’t have held on to such a thin—almost invisible—hope that the bridge was somehow the key to his identity.

“Where should we go now?” I asked as Tuck and I walked off the bridge. All was still and quiet now. No cars. No ghost. No shadow of a noose over the water. We climbed back into his car, the little rusted Honda Civic that had driven us here today.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Let me think. I had a weird dream on the bridge when we fell asleep.”

“I had a weird dream, too.”

“I dreamed I jumped in,” Tuck said.

“I dreamed someone pushed me in.”

“That’s almost the same dream,” he said. He looked at me in the dashboard lights. “We better find a hotel.”

“Together?”

“Most rooms come with two beds.”

I felt my cheeks going red. “It doesn’t matter,” I told him. “I won’t sleep either way. One room will save money.”

He glanced at me with a strange look—he was smiling, but sad. It occurred to me for the first time that I didn’t know what Tuck was hoping to get out of all this. It had felt at first like a way for him to pass the time—to play detective. But now?

“One room, two beds,” I said more gently. “We should stay together tonight.”

He nodded and drove.

The motel we found had a big empty parking lot and little dingy rooms. The desk clerk was a middle-aged woman with a red face, angry and pinched. I was glad Tuck was with me, until we got into the room, and then I was suddenly overcome with awkwardness. I immediately climbed into one of the beds fully dressed and lay there looking at the ceiling, while Tuck took a shower.

“Sleepy?” he asked when he emerged from the bathroom, smelling damp and warm and like soap.

“No,” I said. “Well, yes.”

He grinned. “Was this a mistake?” he said. “You seem uneasy.”

“No. I’m not. I’m just not used to being—”

“With a naked man?”

“I was going to say away from home.”

“Want to watch TV?” Tuck asked. “That’s a nice normal wholesome activity.”

I sat up in bed, and Tuck gave me the remote. I clutched it, exhausted. I felt worn-out from the drive. Tuck’s Honda Civic was a rusty rattling thing with a dented door and a missing mirror on one side. The rust and rattling didn’t bother me, but the whoosh of cars coming past us on the highway, the flicker of highway markers as we raced past them, all the sounds of the highway and the reminders of how far away from home we were—those things nearly did me in.