On TV, the girl’s parents looked more shell-shocked than joyous as they faced the news cameras, as if the truth presented to them had to be a hoax because their daughter had always seemed so unfettered, sprawled on the couch doing her nails and watching MTV. They were glad she was home, Mary-Sue could tell, but she also saw that their innocence was no longer intact; their daughter’s happiness had been a lie. She felt an affinity with the mother whose pallid lips were quivering under the glare of the lights.

When the report ended, she turned to Kate, whose tense expression was hard to read. Mary-Sue teared up, in spite of herself. “Come here.” She stretched her hand out to her daughter, who reciprocated the move. “If you’d done that to me, dear girl, I would have killed you.” She grabbed her hand and rubbed it possessively. “I swear I would have murdered you myself.”

Kate’s earlier hunch had been right. Of course, Bluto was in the area. Pheromones, maybe. He was standing in the driveway when she went out with the trash.

She was almost relieved that he’d come.

“I was invited, but I didn’t feel it was my place,” he said. “Want to go for a little walk? Up the hill to Mount Curve? Stop in at the am/pm to partake in our traditional Mountain Dew, Sprite and iced tea combo?”

“You can’t just waltz back into people’s lives and expect everything to be the same as you left it, okay? You can’t just lurk, and then show your face when it’s convenient to you!”

“You heard about Brittany?” He lurched forward and locked her in an embrace. “I came to say goodbye. I’m going back East. For good.”

She stopped breathing.

“I’ve come to my senses,” he said. “When did you become one of those lobotomized sleepwalkers?”

She slapped him. Her hands were small and soft and bare. She punched him in the chest. The tears came. “Fuck you, Paul Corot.”

He grabbed her hands and shushed her with a light kiss on the forehead. From inside his jacket he pulled out a small parcel wrapped in Christmas paper.

“Open it.”

She did. Inside, a stack of folded papers, grimy with age. In the moonless night, it was hard to see what they were. Each page was a pastiche—newsprint, photos, ransom notes? She moved them into the pool of light spilling from the kitchen window. These were the collages they made together as sulky teenagers . . .

“All these years, I carried them everywhere with me, like religious relics. Bill Cosby’s in there somewhere, strangling Idi Amin with his sweater. So’s our ad for the Sid Vicious birthday cake company.” He laughed quietly. “And that imaginary review of Macbeth starring Hervé Villechaize, Zelda Rubinstein and assorted Scottish bagpipes. This is all of it.”