In that quiet I want to blurt out everything. I want to tell Flynn the whole truth.

But I can’t.

I can’t tell him about that night in the woods. If I even try, he’ll know one of two things: either I’m a fraud, a pathetic lying tool, or I am batshit insane.

“You know how we talked about talent.” I measure the words. “About gifts.” My heart’s pounding. I’m so close to going too far. “If something’s given to you, then somebody else had to give it, right? And if they give you more and more, won’t they—probably—want something in return?”

I stare straight into Flynn’s eyes. I’m begging him to understand. I’m praying for him to see through the words into what I can’t say.

Flynn’s eyes are greenish brown and steady.

He looks right back at me.

“Giving everything is scary,” he says at last. “Giving your whole self to something—it’s huge. I know. But sometimes that’s what music demands.” Slowly, lazily, he scratches his bicep with his missing-fingered hand. “Sometimes it demands a sacrifice.”

A spear of terror juts through me.

I look away. Fast.

No, I tell myself. No way. This is Flynn. He didn’t mean anything more by it. He couldn’t know his words would stick like a knife in my unzipped chest.

We sit still for another minute, chair to chair.

I finally get my breathing under control.

“Well,” I mumble at last, getting up, “I should go. I don’t mean to screw up your lesson schedule.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Flynn stands up, too. He smiles, squeezing my shoulder with one calloused hand. “Sometimes you’ve just got to go to confession. I get it.”

He follows me toward the door.

His next student, a middle schooler with angry-looking acne blistered across his forehead, is waiting right outside, guitar case in his hands.

“Any time you need to talk, I’m here,” Flynn says.

But then he ushers the kid inside and shuts the insulated metal door. And I’m alone in the empty waiting room, with that knife still sticking in my chest.

Thea

I follow the little white car away from the music studio and back to Anders’s house. I’m behind the big pine before he pulls into the driveway. After watching him step safely through his front door, I steer the bike back into the trees. I keep away from the road, deep in the shade, where no one will see how fast I can ride. I don’t know my own speed, but I’m faster than Anders’s car. Faster than any car I’ve ever chased.

The air whips past me.

It’s getting cold. Afternoon is turning to evening, the blue sky folding into violet. There’s a trace of smoke coming somewhere not far away. Burning pine.

There’s a spot where the ground folds, and a creek bed, just a muddy slash now, winds through a knot of giant oaks. I’m riding down the slope when I feel them.

They’re right behind me.