“Draw Four!” Cole slapped down his Uno card, and both Nadia and her dad groaned in mock horror.

While her little brother cackled in glee, Dad said, “You sure you didn’t stack the deck?”

“Nope.” Cole’s feet swung back and forth beneath the dining table’s bench. “I’m just that good.”

As Dad laughed, Nadia heard her phone chime with a text message, but she ignored it for the moment. Cole hadn’t been sleeping well lately—not the nightmares, not like before. But he was restless, getting up two or three times a night to ask for water or turn on random lights. That was a bad sign, one Nadia recognized as well as her father by now. They were concentrating on Cole now, trying to get him back to the good place he’d been in just after the move.

And worrying about Cole meant she didn’t have as much time to worry about everything else.

“So tomorrow I thought I’d make chicken soft tacos,” she said as she threw down a card. “What do you say to that?”

She’d expected Cole to cheer and Dad to simply agree, but Dad was the one who answered first. “You’ve been spending too much time in the kitchen lately. You should be going out. Having fun. If you want tacos—why don’t we go to that Mexican place in town? La Catrina? That’s the one.”

Nadia felt it almost like a slap.

“And that guy works there, right?” Dad gave her a look as he played his own card. “Mateo. The superhero.”

“He’s not a superhero,” Nadia insisted, though even now she couldn’t forget how Mateo had looked in the first moment she’d seen him, his face illuminated by lightning.

“Ah, but he’s not available. I forgot.” There was no way she was going to correct Dad on that one; if he found out Mateo wasn’t dating anybody, he was likely to suggest Nadia should propose. “Well, we could eat out somewhere else. Drive over to the next town, get some pizza, maybe. If La Catrina is a, I don’t know, a sensitive subject.”

“Pizza!” Cole crowed, before playing his Reverse card.

Between her brother the cutthroat Uno prodigy and her dad in look-I’m-so-sensitive mode, Nadia thought she needed a break from the table. “Hang on. I’m gonna check my phone.”

Obviously the text would be from Verlaine. They weren’t friends, exactly—there was something about Verlaine that kept Nadia feeling oddly distant—but they got along, and they were partners in figuring out whatever it was Elizabeth was up to. So this text would be either about the weird patterns of disasters spreading through Captive’s Sound and what they might mean—or questions about Novels class. Everything had been quiet today, so Nadia figured it was about Novels class, even though it was weird for Verlaine to be worrying about homework on a Friday night.

Instead, the screen read, Message From Mateo Perez.

Nadia sucked in a breath. For a moment she just stared down at the screen. Then she thumbed the message open to see: Meet me tomorrow at the beach? By my house. My lunch shift ends at 3.