She thought about that as she got on the on-ramp for the 405, her eyes blurred from crying, her cheeks wet and stinging, her throat feeling as though it had been rubbed with sandpaper. As argumentative as Quentin could be when you backed him into a corner, as self-destructive as he could become if given half a chance, he’d never hurt another person. Not the Quentin she knew. And though he had a tendency to hide things, shooting two people and killing one was simply too big a thing to hide. Wasn’t it? Did she not know her best friend as well as she thought she did?

She recalled all the conversations she’d had with him since Mitchell Bloom’s death. All the updates and exchanges of information and the thinking aloud they’d done on the shooting. Not one of those conversations had made her feel as though there were something Quentin wasn’t telling her.

Except for the last one.

Summer dried her eyes on the bottom of her white T-shirt. She breathed slowly, carefully, as though the end of her crying was something fragile and tentative and the slightest move could start her up again. The thing was, Summer wasn’t a crier, not usually. She probably vomited more frequently than she cried, and she found them both equally unpleasant.

If she didn’t think of that last conversation with Quentin, Summer figured she could make the rest of the ride home without losing it again. But then she turned on the radio. Rihanna. “We Found Love.” Quentin and Dean’s wedding song.

“Jesus Christ,” she whispered.

As she turned off the radio, a phone rang. Not her iPhone, but an old-fashioned beeping like a cell phone from the ’90s. Summer thought it had come from inside her own brain until she realized it was the burner she kept in her purse. The Closure tipline. Well, that’s ironic.

She hadn’t gotten a call on that phone in at least a month. She glanced at the clock on her dashboard. 5:50 A.M. Quentin had called her at that hour when he’d first arrived in New York, apologizing when he remembered the time difference, and for a moment, she allowed herself the fantasy that it was him calling again, that all this was some big misunderstanding on the police’s part that he and Dean would laugh about once he arrived in New York.

She slipped the phone out of her purse and put it to her ear. “This is the Closure podcast. May I help you?”

“I heard about Quentin.” It was an older man’s voice, ragged and sad. “I heard it on the news.”

Summer switched lanes, her eyes on the rearview, then on the near-empty freeway in front of her, the sky blushing pink from the recent sunrise. “Who is this, please?”