I sat down, right there in the hallway, and leaned against the wall. I set down Lucas’s clothes, put my hands on the scratched-up floorboards, felt all the house’s grooves and dents.

“I knew something happened to you,” I said.

“I thought something happened to you,” Lucas said. “You just disappeared. We didn’t know if you were coming back or what.”

“Of course I was coming back. I live here.”

Cole had joined me, and I looked right into his dark eyes. I held his gaze. I was nervous he would immediately recognize that something had shifted between us. Even I wasn’t sure what that shift meant exactly, but I held some power, now that I’d met his mother, his wife, now that I knew his name. I imagined it written on a slip of paper, folded neatly and stored in a box. Yes, I had the name, but I still didn’t know what to do with it. It turned out a name wasn’t powerful unless you understood how to use it.

“Where did you even go?” Lucas asked.

“I went to the cape,” I said, which was true. “I stayed at a motel.”

“Kind of expensive,” Lucas said, holding his hands up as if to say why in the world would you do that.

“I was with Tuck. Anyway, I’m back now.”

“I can’t work for a few days, at least,” Lucas said, holding up his bandaged hand and staring at it. “I’m just home again, I guess.”

“We can all be home together again,” Cole said.

“I was lying down,” Lucas said. “But then I heard Lydia yelling.”

“Keep resting,” Cole said.

Lucas went back into his room. But I stayed where I was, on the floor, and Cole stayed where he was. When I first saw the bloody clothes, I’d imagined something terrible. Lucas’s chest, his throat. Cole with a knife. A pair of scissors. I could see him standing by Emily at the bottom of the stairs. I still saw those things, even though Lucas was okay, even though the girl in the bed was far away.

“I’m so tired,” I said to Cole, and I was. “Please let me rest.”

He turned and walked away, down the stairs.

Tuck and I had agreed that I wouldn’t confront him alone. “Just take your time,” Tuck had said when we were back in Carson Cove waiting for the ferry that would take me home. “Let’s take a few days and figure out the best way to tell him what we know. You don’t want to put yourself in danger.”

“Last night you were all like give him the benefit of the doubt. Last night you didn’t think he was dangerous.”

“I still don’t think he’s dangerous, not really—but why risk it?”