Luke throws his partially buttoned shirt over his head but doesn’t secure the rest of the buttons. Then he grabs his tie from the floor and lets it hang loose around his neck. I consider getting dressed in my clothes from earlier today like he has, but then I decide to hell with it. I grab my red fleece robe and wrap it around my body.

He smiles in approval. I bought the robe because it’s warm, but it has the added bonus of being red. I swear I didn’t consider that when I purchased it, but perhaps subconsciously I did.

The contents of the refrigerator are even more abysmal than I feared. I have a loaf of bread, but when Luke picks it up, there’s green mold growing at the bottom. There’s a bottle of ketchup. There’s dry pasta in one of the cupboards, but no pasta sauce. Only ketchup.

“I eat out a lot,” I say apologetically.

“I would hope so.”

He opens another cupboard and finds a package of only slightly stale saltines and some peanut butter. It’s not exactly the dinner of champions, but it will do. I have a pack of water bottles at the bottom of the fridge, and I retrieve one for myself and hand the other to Luke, who is busy making peanut butter and saltine sandwiches.

“Sorry,” I say.

“Don’t be sorry.” He pauses to lick peanut butter off the butter knife. “This was my favorite meal from ages seven through ten.”

I smiled to myself, imagining Luke as a freckle-faced second grader. “I bet you were a cute kid.”

“I was,” he assures me. He slides one of the saltine peanut butter sandwiches over to me. I take a bite—it tastes about as you would think it would. “I didn’t become a handful until I was a teenager.”

I arch an eyebrow. “You gave your parents a hard time? That’s hard to imagine.”

He licks some peanut butter off his upper lip. “Not exactly. I got into some trouble though. Legal trouble.”

“Legal trouble? Really?”

He hesitates as if considering lying about it even though he just told me it was true. I’m sure Luke Strauss has a tell, but I haven’t found it yet. “Yes.”

“Like what?”

“Hacking.” He winces. “I thought I was so smart… until I got caught. I got in a shitload of trouble. Luckily, I was a minor and my parents got me a good lawyer. I just did community service and they made sure it didn’t end up on my permanent record.”

“Wow. I’m impressed.”

“Impressed that I was a hacker? Or impressed that I stayed out of jail?”

“Both. But mostly, the first.” I crumble a bit of cracker under my fingertips. “Can you still do it?”

“Do what?”

“Hack into computers.”