“It means you can’t tell your brother, all right? If you get married one day, you can’t tell your spouse. You can’t even tell your priest.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” I said. A small loneliness washed over me. “Sounds like the rules would make marriage and family pretty hard.”

“That might be why we tend to pair off with one another,” he said, and gave me a little smile.

Was he flirting with me? No, he couldn’t possibly be.

“But seriously,” he continued, “you have to be really careful. Don’t keep any images that show Seconds in their true form. Delete them without putting them on your hard drive, and reformat the card they were on. Don’t do internet searches on terms like ‘Second Emanation’ or on the names of any Seconds you get to know. Don’t keep a diary. Not an accurate one, anyway. Always be certain a person is one of us before saying anything incriminating. At least a few governments around the world have suspicions about this stuff, and you don’t want to give information to an undercover agent by accident.”

I nodded. I hadn’t really thought about how many ways there were to slip up. It occurred to me that I’d already broken the rules in a big way by showing the picture of Bob’s foot around Pete’s, but if Graham didn’t bring it up, I sure as heck wasn’t going to.

“So,” he said, “why don’t you make that call to your boss. Let’s think about what you’re going to tell him.”

As Graham coached me, I realized I was going to have to get used to lying a lot more. His advice was to keep it simple — a straightforward excuse or explanation was easier to remember and often more convincing. It could also be helpful, he said, to blame yourself. That way people spent their time being annoyed at you instead of questioning your story.

“The thing is, I don’t know if Dr. Nielsen will have found out about how I left town and then was questioned by the police about Justine. If he knows about that, it’s going to get complicated.”

Graham pulled into a space a few houses down from Ben’s. “How could he know about that? It’s a police matter.”

I rolled my eyes. “Clearly, you’re not from a small town.”

He laughed. “Well, let’s think of how you might handle either situation. That way you’ll be prepared to follow the conversation wherever it goes.”

After some discussion, I called Dr. Nielsen at home and told him I still wasn’t feeling well and might need to take another sick day on Monday.

“Beth, that’s fine,” he said. “Head injuries are unpredictable that way. But why didn’t you call earlier? I was expecting you back on Thursday. I’ve been worried.”