The girls started back at school, and Rosemary was pleasantly surprised to learn that Bryce Zehring no longer taught there. When it made the news that he had been located in Ireland, where he’d fled to escape a statutory rape charge, she felt a ghost tug of responsibility for her own silence. After Alicia Hwang started pointing fingers, the LA Times uncovered that Mr. Z had been fired from a co-ed boarding school in Boston two years prior for “improper conduct” with a female student. In the same article, a Nandita Singh of Mount Curve was quoted as saying she had complained to the police multiple times about him spying on her from his car. A “deeply unsavory character,” she called him. Yet he couldn’t be classified a stalker because he never got out of his car, never did anything outwardly worrying. He simply lurked. When the cops did nothing, her husband bought the family a bull terrier to stand guard.

Rosemary was now more curious than ever about what had been in that red backpack. Were they things, like the props and his playscript, say, that would prove the best of him, or things that would prove the worst? Now she’d never know. Arik, in his funny way, had made her darkest wish come true. Maybe that was the price of not knowing. They would forever be bound, even if they never spoke again.

She pulled out her phone and stared at the electric rose Mr. Z had sent her.

@};--

The wonderful thing about electric roses was they didn’t fade, and their thorns couldn’t scratch you when you put them in the trash. She deleted Mr. Z from her address book, as she had done Arik.

Barely two months in and the girls had become many things to Raymond—call screener, door answerer, proofreader (he’d begun outlining a new novel), foot rubber, bath runner, remote-control finder, light-bulb changer, bartender, typist, fan club, cook. They’d reeled him in, hook, line and sinker. He let them drink, on weekends—it was the least he could do.

Once, after a jubilant, mimosa-fueled breakfast, he pulled Mira aside and asked her why she’d stalked him so vehemently, masquerading as a naked daemon.

“What are you talking about?”

There was something in the way she said this, the confusion knitting her brow, that told him she wasn’t playing. This child could not lie. A shiver passed through him—first terror, then something better.

She saw his secret smile. She read his creases like a book. “What is it?”

“Nothing. A simple case of mistaken identity.”