Because you wrote to him, the reasonable part of her brain said. Of course he knew you had an idea. Why else would you be trying to find an agent?

But he’d never asked about what she wanted to write next, never referenced her proposal or asked to see pages during their meal… and another voice was suggesting something different. Maybe you didn’t really have a story, it said. Maybe he put one inside you.

Sarah moaned again and pressed one dirty fist against her mouth. Now that she’d thought of it, she couldn’t stop thinking. What if this wasn’t her story but was, instead, something that had been… shoved into her brain, somehow? Whispered into her ear while she slept; planted, like a dark seed inside of her, during the night, that she couldn’t remember? And what would happen when this monstrous plant was setting its polluted roots, when it unfurled its terrible blooms? Would it push and claw its way through her and leave her in bloody pieces on the floor?

Sarah went to the bathroom. She wet a cake of soap and worked it against her fingernails, harder and harder, scrubbing and rinsing and scrubbing again until every trace of red was gone. Maybe she’d sleepwalked. Maybe she’d scratched her legs as she’d done it. There had to be a plausible, rational explanation for what had happened, one that didn’t involve magic, or some kind of psychic rape. And then, not knowing what else to do, not knowing who to ask, or which parts of what she’d dreamed and what she’d imagined and what might have happened in the real world were true, Sarah sat down at the kitchen table. She flipped open her laptop and fell into the story again.

The next time Vaughn and Bucky saw each other was after Thanksgiving, when Vaughn was closing up the Kaplans’ hot tub and Bucky was doing a final walk-through of the house after the Thanksgiving holiday.

“How’ve you been?” asked Bucky as Vaughn bent, grunted, and pulled a bright-red scrap of fabric from the hot tub’s filter. When he tossed the scrap of cloth on the deck, Bucky could see lace. Panties, he figured. Maybe even a thong.

Remarkably, Vaughn didn’t make a juvenile comment. Instead, he just shook his head.

“Something wrong?” asked Bucky. Mr. Perceptive, his wife called him, at moments like that. In deference to the weather, Vaughn was actually wearing a shirt. Bucky had just enough time to feel grateful for the coverage when Vaughn bent down to dump a cupful of chemicals into the hot tub’s churning water, a move that put his ass crack on glorious display. Bucky tried not to sigh.

Vaughn stood up, holding the empty cup in his hand. With his eyes on the ground, he said, “You know Anheuser went missing, right?”

“No.” Anheuser was Vaughn’s dog, a big, good-natured long-legged, black-coated creature of indeterminate breed and permanent halitosis, as amiable and dopy as his owner. In spite of his terrible breath, Anheuser was beloved by the Island’s year-rounders. “Since when?”