Sarah’s mind was whirling madly from one thing—her job! her apartment! Elder Island!—to another, pinballing among all of the reasons why she couldn’t leave right now. Not the least of which was: she had fewer than three thousand dollars in her checking account.

“Don’t think this is charity.” Will smiled. “I’ll be taking the cost of the rental out of the advance I’m going to get you.”

“But…”

“Yes,” he’d said, and put his hands on her shoulders, his gaze boring into hers. “I’m sure.”

And that, it seemed, had been that. Will had escorted her downstairs and she’d climbed into the car—the same one from the previous night. At her apartment, she’d thrown clothes and books and chargers into a bag. She’d left a note for her roommates, along with a check for her portion of the next month’s rent, and the car had waited for her, and had driven her to the ferry, which had taken her to Elder Island, which, Google informed her, was a thirty-five-square-mile island with a year-round population of just under three thousand (99 percent of them were white), a population that increased by a factor of ten in the summer. The average price of a single-family home was $3.3 million. There’d been Native Americans there, once. Most of whom had died of smallpox in the 1740s and 1750s, after white settlers deliberately infected them. Some residents believe that the island is cursed, Sarah read. They say that Chief Wanahinpah’s dying proclamation was that the spirits of wild animals would inhabit the settlers’ souls, that they would tear at one another with tooth and claw until the tides ran red with blood.

Nice.

Sarah gathered herself and went to the kitchen. The pantry was stocked with everything she liked, right down to her preferred brand of almond milk and the flavors of oatmeal. She wondered how Will had done it, how he’d chosen what she would have picked for herself and gotten it all here. Money, she thought. If you’ve got enough money you can do anything. The refrigerator, too, was full; the options a little heavy on the red meat, but that was men for you. Steaks and chops and burgers. After her mother died, that had been all her father would eat, with a baked potato as the only vegetable. How would you like that cooked? a waitress would ask. Bloody, her dad would say, or Still mooin’, making what passed, in the Vernon household, for a joke as he bared his teeth in what passed, in the Vernon household, for a smile.