Things didn’t escalate. Or maybe they did, and we were just lobsters in a pot, the temperature rising so slowly we didn’t realize it was lethal until it was too late.

It went like this: I’d meet up with Jack. An hour later, I’d get the first text. Then the calls would come, one after the other. Finally I’d leave Jack at the lake or at his place and drive to the Pink Mansion.

Sometimes Elise sported a new bruise. More often she didn’t. We’d sit in my car, parked on the road where her father couldn’t see us. We’d talk, sometimes cry. I’d distract her, and that’s what she needed most then.

Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.

That night was no different.

“Elise cries wolf,” Jack said flatly, soon after I arrived at his house. He had the whole place to himself, Evan and his parents at dinner with his grandparents on his dad’s side.

“No, she doesn’t,” I said, petting Lola by my side as Jack stood by the stove, making us pasta. “She just really needs me right now.”

Love is to need and be needed. Love is truest, strongest when you need each other, when you can’t live without each other.

“Come on, Remy,” he said, like he expected better from me. “You know it’s true, and you know you don’t want to go.”

“It’s complicated,” I said, and then really heard myself. It was what my dad had said once upon a time when we were sharing an ice cream and rebelling against Mom. I hadn’t understood what he meant. It all seemed so simple to me back then, so black and white. But now I understood how he felt, how he probably still feels now. How an intense shared history could make it hard to give something up. Knowing this made them more human to me.

Jack shook his head. “She wants to know you’ll always come when she calls.” He hadn’t seen her bruises. And I’d promised Elise I wouldn’t tell anyone. “She wants to know you’ll always pick her over me. More than that, she wants me to know you’ll always leave if she asks.”

“That’s not true!” I said. Sometimes I thought about breaking my promise to Elise just so he’d understand, but I couldn’t.

“Isn’t it, though?” Jack said, the frustration in his voice growing.

“It isn’t,” I insisted.

“Then prove it,” he said, challenging me. “You know she’s going to text you soon, then call with some emergency.”

I couldn’t deny it. I glanced at my phone, checking the time. We had forty-five minutes before the first text came, maybe an hour if we were lucky.

“When she does, don’t answer,” he said. “Prove to me, to her, to yourself, that you can say no to her.” Jack was angry, and I couldn’t blame him. We’d hardly seen each other in the last few weeks. But more than that, I’d never seen Jack angry. He was at his limit, and maybe I was too.