Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out, I told myself. It didn’t mean anything. Games of chess were the antithesis of sexy. They were cerebral. And long. And kind of boring, if you tended to lose often. Trust me on this. But even as I rattled off those indisputable facts, I knew I wasn’t as successful in convincing my on-fire brain that there was no flirtation afoot as I had been last night.

A flurry of questions arose and swirled: Was Esha Chakra-barti single? Arthur had never mentioned her having a romantic partner. But had she ever been married? Divorced and was still pining? Considered becoming a nun? She lived in London, I knew that much, which made her hella geographically undesirable—a happy check in the “negative” column—though if someone truly wanted to date another person no amount of distance could stand in their way.

Suddenly I was reminded about Brody Tuck and our breakup conversation as we sat on the picnic tables in Partridge Park. He had made that very point after I had presented what I’d considered to be sound reasoning for why we couldn’t continue to date while I was gone.

My head started to fog up like I was coming down with an emotional flu.

“Finley?”

Arthur sounded like he was speaking to me through water and I barely registered him, too caught up in the overwhelming sense that I had screwed everything up with my parents, even if logically I knew better—

“Finley,” he said, louder, and this time I snapped out of my mental tailspin. Or at least slowed it down.

I blinked. “What?”

“What is our ultimate destination?”

Death, I wanted to say. But instead: “Claus Kitchen.” Then I sighed.

“Bugger. We passed that blocks ago.”

A glance around and I realized we were near the end of Jolly Lane, where it left the commercial zone.

Arthur tugged at the wheel because turning a Hummer around was not as deft as, say, a Honda. It required a lot of “turn left . . . turn left . . . turn left . . . turn right” for whole streets until we were headed back toward CK.

“Sorry,” I muttered. “I started . . . daydreaming.” Technically true.

He glanced at me. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah.”

Another glance and I knew he didn’t believe me. I was going to have to start thinking of some better answers when people asked me that question. Before Arthur could do exactly that, however, he was thankfully distracted.

“Is that . . . an elf?”