“She’ll pass by there on the way home from the hospital anyway,” he informed me. “Who were you talking to this morning?”

I gulped down some coffee to hide my surprise at his question. Whenever I was chatting with Henry, I tried to keep my voice down so that Dad and Rhonda couldn’t hear me because the walls in their condo were thin. “Just a friend from home,” I answered honestly.

“When it’s six o’clock here, it’s five o’clock in Wisconsin,” he reminded me, as if I wasn’t aware of the time difference. “Kinda early to be talking to someone back at home.”

“He’s not in Wisconsin,” I clarified. “Sometimes I talk to Olivia’s brother. He’s taking the semester off from school to teach tennis in France.” There was no point in lying. I’d only been allowed to have a phone again because both my mom and dad had access to everything, including passwords to all of my accounts. If he wanted to know who I was speaking with every morning, it wouldn’t take him long to find out. Henry, Mischa, and even Cheryl knew better than to ever put anything in writing that they wouldn’t want my parents to read.

Dad crossed his arms over his chest as he swished coffee around in the mug he held. “Hmm. That Richmond kid, huh? The one who was at the ski lodge with you?”

I hurriedly clarified (not for the first time) that Henry had not been at the ski lodge with me and Trey, which was the story we’d all been telling for months, and I dashed out the back door to begin my walk to school. Since the end of January, I’d been evading questions from both of my parents about why I’d escaped from the boarding school where I’d been sent in the fall, and how Trey and I had ended up in Michigan to meet up with our former classmates during their ski trip. There was no way I could tell them any of it without sounding like a maniac—that we had to stop Violet before a bunch of people whose deaths she’d predicted were expected to die. I guess I just had to accept that no matter how much time passed, my dad was never going to let it go.

It was barely six thirty in the morning when I reached our corner, and the humidity was already at 70 percent.

My high school in Tampa was a lot larger than Willow High School, with nearly three times as many students. You might think it would be hard to avoid making friends while surrounded by so many people, but I was finding it easy to go unnoticed. Teachers didn’t make a big deal on my first day about introducing me. My chemistry partner, Alianne, was nice enough, correctly read my disengaged vibe, and politely ignored me in the cafeteria at lunchtime. No one encouraged me to join clubs or sports teams.

During study hall, I took my usual seat on the red couch in Ms. Hernández’s office and we went through our routine, which, at this point, going into my tenth week at Hyde Park High, was becoming rote.