He couldn’t read what she meant in that one word, but the sound of his name on her tongue, in her mouth, was worth the embarrassment of showing up at her school looking like he was stalking her.

“I really can’t believe I’m sitting here looking at you,” he said.

“It’s like some weird half-dream,” she agreed without looking up. “Or nightmare.”

He laughed. “You know, I used to dream about seeing you. I don’t anymore. I wish I would, but I can’t . . . they don’t come to me. I used to have them all the time—bizarre dreams where I couldn’t get to you.”

“What do you mean?” She sat up now, swung her feet to the ground.

“You’d be in a restaurant, in a crowd, across a room . . . and I would try to touch you, but the closer I got, the farther away you’d go. You never saw me in those dreams. I only had two dreams where you saw me. One time was when I saw you across a restaurant at a bar that looked like it was made completely of glass and silver. You were holding a bottle of tequila.”

“I don’t drink tequila.”

“I don’t think that was the point of the dream.” He pinched her nose.

“What was the point?”

“You saw me. Noticed me. You waved and walked over. But you never said a word and we walked outside, drove off in my truck.”

“Okay . . .”

“I carried that dream around for years. You saw me. You left with me. Then I had my last dream about you . . . it was years ago. You were floating on top of the ocean, on your back. You’d look at me once in a while, wave, then tuck your head back on the waves. I yelled at you to return to shore—there were sharks. I tried to swim after you, but in that weird dream way when you can’t swim or walk or run, I couldn’t get to you. I screamed, I tried to swim, I crawled through the sand, but you just floated and floated. You couldn’t see what I saw: the sharks.”

Amy lifted her head. “I had a dream recently about floating in the ocean. Well, it wasn’t really a dream—it lasted ten seconds before Carol Anne rang the living hell out of the doorbell.”

“Always count on Carol Anne to ruin a good time.”

“Carol Anne is the best friend I’ve ever had.”

Nick took a deep breath. “Have you told her about . . . all this?”

“Yes. Yes, I have. Well, a little. I kept some . . . specifics to myself.”

“What did you tell her?”

“What really happened to you, where you were—the jail.”

“What did she say?”

“You don’t want to know.” Amy smiled.