I took the nearest seat and flopped down on it, settling Brad on my lap. He spun around to face me, sitting up very straight and getting hair all over my coat. His mouth was half-open, and even though I knew that dogs didn’t really smile—that this was the anthropomorphizing that we projected onto them—I could have sworn that he was grinning at me.

I reached out and ran my hand over his head. He immediately scooted closer and nudged at it the second I stopped. I smiled and gave him a scratch behind the ears. “Good boy, Brad,” I said as he tilted his head to the side, really leaning into the scratch. I still couldn’t believe that I’d survived an attempted mugging, and that this tiny, fluffy dog had been trying to protect me the whole time. I leaned down slightly toward him and scratched the other ear, whispering to him like we were sharing a secret, no longer caring at all what the other random strangers on this train thought. “That was such a good boy.”

Every now and then, I would get a feeling about something. It wasn’t even anything close to psychic powers—which I wasn’t entirely certain I believed in, despite the fact that I’d watched a lot of Little Medium marathons with Teri and Kat. It was more like, the phone would ring, and before my mom answered it, I knew it would be my aunt. Or as we walked up to the cast list for Midsummer, I knew suddenly that I was going to be Titania despite the fact that I’d only read for it once. Just very occasionally, and probably completely explained by lucky guesses and coincidences. But they still happened. And even before the doors opened at the Bryant Park station, I had a feeling that Kat wasn’t there.

It didn’t stop me from looking. I walked up and down the platform, even switched to the other side and back again, hoping against hope that every person I saw in a coat with a hood—and there were a lot of them—would be my best friend. But it never was.

She was gone, just like I somehow knew she’d be.

Meanwhile, back in Connecticut…

TERI STARED AT THE MAN with the tire iron. In that moment, she wished she’d never agreed to let Kat leave her phone at her house. She could be watching eighties movies with Ryan Camper right now.

“Where am I?” he repeated, his voice louder. He took a step closer, and Teri took a step back, motioning for the kids to get behind her.

“You’re… at the Stone house,” she said. Her voice came out shaky. “In Stanwich.” He just stared at her. “Connecticut?”

“Why were you in the trunk?” Chris asked.

“Yeah,” Daryl added.

“Connecticut,” the man repeated. He closed his eyes for a long moment.