She smiled slightly, and he seemed to like the distraction. For a moment, the expression on his face lightened.

“What about your dad’s parents?”

“That’s…complicated.”

“Well, you’re in complicated territory now.”

“So you believe me?” he asked, shoving his hands in the pockets of his tattered khaki shorts. “This isn’t just some medical condition?”

“No.” Her voice was definitive. “Something is wrong. Maxwell, I’m so sorry.”

Oddly, he looked relieved, like he welcomed the confirmation that this wasn’t all in his head. This only made Vera’s chest ache more, because it proved what she’d already suspected—he truly had no idea how bad this was going to get.

Vera cracked open the back door to her house, millimeter by millimeter, and crept inside. But before she could carefully close the storm door, her neighbor’s little white puff let out a yap. She swore that four-legged snitch was out to get her.

She narrowed her eyes, and the dog yapped on.

Vera shut the door, muffling its calls, then crept up the stairs and past her aunt’s room—not a stir. She slipped into her bedroom and tiptoed into her private bathroom, tempted to take a shower and erase the smell of flowers that clung to her hair and the tears that had dried on her skin, but it would be hard to explain a post–one a.m. shower to her aunt.

She clutched her phone. She’d called her parents during the drive. They didn’t answer. She left a message, not divulging everything but professing it was an emergency. She promised to stay up for their call. So she washed her face and waited for the ring.

Something happened back at that house. Not just with his mother, but with Vera. When she stood on the curb waiting for Maxwell, she wasn’t just drowning in fear and sadness, there was something else, something more shameful coursing inside her. Exhilaration. Vera’s world shifted into a primal battle of good and evil, right and wrong, black and white, and she could see how her parents would be seduced by this. There was a rush in knowing you were doing something life-altering, soul-transforming. All these years, her entire childhood, creeping past that basement door like a constant game of Operation where you couldn’t graze the edges, now gained a fresh perspective. Her parents were protecting the world from darkness; she knew that before, but she didn’t get it. Now she did.

Vera dried the water drops from her face, inhaling the scent of detergent on her terry cloth towel. It was her scent, her home. She padded across her bedroom floor, toes sinking into the soft fibers of her area rug, pink nails flashing back. She couldn’t believe she’d painted her toenails for him, like she actually thought this somehow mattered. Everything seemed so trivial now, the entire world outside of this situation dimmed, no problem nearly as vibrant.

She peeled back the covers to her bed and slipped in, the sheets cool from the hum of the air conditioner lodged in the window. Her eyes fixed on her whirling ceiling fan.