“You wanted Mark to be your second act?” I asked, still trying to understand what Damien wants, what Mark is to him. Did he kidnap him or had they been on the run together? Was it somehow both?

“Look, Rose, why are you here?” Damien sighed. “What do you want from me?”

“I just want to understand, I guess,” I said. “I thought we were friends.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t have those.”

“But you just said—”

“I’m not going to have any answers that you like,” he said, moving into the kitchen.

“I’m not asking you to tell me what I want to hear, Damien,” I called after him, unsure if I was allowed to follow. “I just want to know the truth.”

He came back into the living room, a nearly empty bottle of bourbon in one hand and a half-filled glass in the other.

“Breaking into the booze again?” I asked sharply. “Was your afternoon hangover all but two days ago not a strong enough deterrent?”

“It’s been a rough coupla days,” he said gruffly.

“Yeah, tell me about it,” I snapped.

“Oh please, you just arrived at this party,” he said, setting the bottle on the coffee table and coming to stand in front of me again. He rubbed his forehead with his free hand, looking down at the ground, before lifting his eyes to look at me, his face pulled into a neutral mask.

“I don’t think we should see each other anymore, Rose.” He sighed before taking a big swig from his glass.

“What, are you … breaking up with me?” I asked, confused by the abrupt turn in the conversation.

“Don’t tell me you came here today to say you’re on my side,” he scoffed. “I know how this particular movie ends and I don’t really need to sit through the credits.”

“I came here today because I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt,” I said. “Because I know I haven’t known you for very long but I thought we were becoming good friends. I thought you understood me, I thought you could help—”

“Aha!” he hissed. “There it is, the real reason.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s not that you want to let me tell my side of the story,” he said, his smile like barbed wire, “it’s that you want to know which bits I’ve told you are true, right? You want to know if the AM really is withholding some kind of secret cure from your dad.”

I swallowed, trying to match his stare-down as best I could. I recognized the look, knew how he felt. His eyes were unblinking, filled with rage, with a kind of pent-up energy that didn’t exist anywhere else in his body, like he didn’t know how to be angry. Like he wasn’t used to getting into arguments where he didn’t immediately get everything he wanted.