Charlie had slept beside me, tucked under the covers of my bed, this time at my behest.

After the incident in her room, I hadn’t gone back inside the house until she and Dad had returned from their battery run.

I hadn’t bothered telling Dad what had happened. He wouldn’t have believed a word of it anyway. Would the Stephanie I had been when we’d first moved into this place have believed me? Knowing Dad, he’d have put me in counseling or taken me for a head scan. Because fixing things was what Dad did. But this wasn’t something Dad would be able to fix.

Lucas, possibly, if I was lucky, might be another story. And the truth was, I’d wanted so badly to call him. I hadn’t dared, though. Because Erik had pretty much proven he could hear any conversation in the house. And if Erik could, that probably meant he could, too. That must have been why Erik wouldn’t confirm my guess that he was a prisoner, just like, I was starting to realize, my family and I were becoming.

And Erik. I’d wanted to talk to him, too. Because now there could be no denying that he was real. Still, a conversation with him would have required me to fall asleep. Something that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do in Moldavia ever again.

Now that I was back at school, though, I was free.

Locker doors slammed and students passed me in the hall, a few giving me curious glances, probably wondering what I was doing anxiously loitering next to my own locker. If I cared, I could’ve pretended to look for something important or peruse my phone. But I couldn’t afford to miss Lucas if he decided to meet me here as I’d texted him to.

But as the hall began to clear, and Lucas’s face wasn’t among those on their way to class, my heart began to sink.

How could someone I’d known for such a small amount of time have done so much to earn a place there? Probably because he cared. And because I, to a certain extent, had let him.

I turned my head in the direction of the thinning stairwell traffic, waiting for him to just appear, the way Erik did in my dreams. Maybe Lucas hadn’t gotten my text. Maybe he was ignoring me. Maybe he’d left his phone at home or—

“Hey, what are we looking at?” came a breathless voice from behind me. I jumped, then spun to regard Lucas, who had come from the other direction.

“Oh,” he said, straightening his short, vintage-style tie. “Sorry about that.” He smiled an involuntary smile at having accidentally startled me. That was, until he realized that I wasn’t smiling with him. His expression immediately sobered. He almost got the chance to ask me what was wrong.

Dropping my books, I collided against Lucas, wrapping my arms around him tight.

Being frightened like that. It had taken me right back to that moment in my sister’s room, when that sheet had settled over . . . over something that wasn’t supposed to be there, its whiteness conforming to the contours of a figure.