“When I was eleven and my brother was ten, my mom was off on safari and my dad put us both in the car when he was drunk. Thank God he was arrested. But we sat there at the police office for hours while they tried to find someone to come pick us up. Finally a family friend came and got us.

“Needless to say, my brother started having drug problems and so my mom sent him away to a boys’ camp in Sedona. When he came back, he was different. And one day, he just decided to ram his bike into the back of a van.”

Luke stopped as if that was the end of his story but Aria wanted to know it all now.

“How did you end up out here, though?” she asked.

Luke started speaking again, but this time, he told his story as if recounting it were a chore. “Well, I could never do anything right by my mother. And yet, I was her favorite. So it was really confusing … I fucking hate my mother. Um, I went to college for a little bit, but I didn’t know what I was interested in, so I just signed up for a bunch of music classes. I was playing trombone. I was interning for the local legislature. And one day, I met this girl and totally fell in love with her so we moved in together. But my mom didn’t like her. She treated her like shit. And she said that if I kept living with her, she’d stop paying for my college. Obviously I refused. So she called the IRS to report me. Basically she had been claiming the money she spent on my college tuition as salary for an employee that didn’t exist. So they came after me for all the money. She expected me to just cave in. But I was so sick of her bullshit that I told the IRS what she’d really been doing. Even the IRS agent thought my mother was a bitch. Anyway, I stopped talking to her. I haven’t talked to her since.”

“What happened to the girl?” Aria asked, suddenly terrified for the answer.

“She died,” Luke said flatly. “I was driving across an intersection and a huge black Suburban hit the wheel well and she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. My lung popped. They told me in the emergency room that she had died. I wanted to die too. It was me that killed her.

“I was hysterical. By the time they let me out of the hospital, I had eighty thousand dollars’ worth of medical debt and nothing to go home to, so I just put everything I needed in my camping backpack and paid for a flight out here.”