Robin drifted off to sleep, still waiting for her mother’s call.

AT 11:45 P.M., Robin’s phone vibrated sharply on the bedstand, waking her from a light, fitful sleep. She blinked at it. She’d uninstalled Twitter about an hour earlier. So many notifications, and they’d all turned out to be hate tweets—hundreds of them. People she’d never met before with flags and frogs and porn models as avatars, calling her a bitch, a dumb skank, feminazi, childless slut. The red-pill crowd telling her to get a boob job, get a facelift, to get laid, to eat poison and die . . . Normally, she wouldn’t have cared all that much. Insults and threats meant her column was getting clicks, which would ultimately up ad revenues before all the trolls moved on to another target. You just breathe deep and ignore it. She’d been through this before, more than once.

But tonight, the ugly words made her feel vulnerable, even scared. She’d locked all the doors in her house, turned on the alarm, yet still, she felt watched. Hunted. How had he found her anyway, this Quentin Garrison?

Robin lifted her phone, remembering her dream—flames enveloping her home, everything burning to the ground.

The text was from Eric:

On my way. Meeting went late. Sorry!

Outside, Robin heard sirens—someone else besides her in this quiet suburban neighborhood, awake and having a crappy night. She stared at Eric’s text. “Fuck you,” she whispered. She thought of Ginny in her patriotic bikini top and typed: Trouble in Paradise. Sent it without hesitation, without thought.

Eric replied: ???

Robin saw it through a blur of tears. I’m not an idiot, she typed.

How had the two of them gotten to this bad place in such a short time? A few years ago, they would have been up and awake together right now, researching the Cooper/LeRoy murders and Quentin Garrison over a bottle of wine—figuring it all out, gazes locked, phones in a drawer. They’d reported stories together in J-school. Sat together at the back of city council meetings, nudging each other in the ribs to stay awake. “We’re a team, you and I,” Eric used to say. “Like Woodward and Bernstein, but with sex.” But now, their texts weren’t even on the same wavelength.

Is there anything worse than being alone in one’s confusion?

It was nearly midnight. Robin’s parents were undoubtedly asleep. She didn’t want to wake them or worry them, but it was a tug-of-war, their feelings versus hers. And the state she was in right now. The ugly questions running through her brain, and she was alone with them. All alone.