I kept watching Kael; I don’t think I’d ever seen someone like him. He wasn’t doing anything spectacular like men in the novels I’d read and films I’d seen, but there was something inside of him that made him sort of glow compared to other people. He was charming, too, but in an unassuming way. He knew who he was, and he gave me this almost competitive feeling, this little burn in my stomach to try to be on his level. He was Elodie’s friend—and he was going to be sleeping in my house! Was it going to be weird? It was absolutely going to be weird. I yanked my visor mirror down and checked my appearance. The light surrounding the mirror came on, but Kael didn’t notice. He was calling someone and standing at least ten feet away from where I was in my car.

Yikes.

I swiped under my eyes. The mascara on my lower lashes had left little flakes of black across the top of my cheekbone. I was pale. Abnormally so. I slapped and pinched my cheeks a little and sucked in my lips and counted to ten. It was what the girls my age were doing on Instagram and getting thousands of views doing so. It worked, but I looked way too frazzled for this evening. I should have finished styling my hair. I turned to scan my backseat, hoping to find one of my gigantic cloth scrunchies. I had at least two in my car at all times. Minimal time spent, with the illusion of effort. I watched as Kael stuck his hand under the metal sheet above his front tire and felt along the surface. He tried to call someone else and I finally found a white hair tie and pulled half of my hair up. A lot of loose pieces of my wavy hair came down. I messed with them a little, and then put gloss on my lips. I glanced at my reflection one last time, and when Kael hung up the phone, I closed the mirror.

The more I watched him, standing there in the dark, pacing around with his iPhone going back and forth from his pocket to his cheek, the more I felt uneasy about this whole situation. I thought Elodie’s excitement over his arrival might be her loneliness getting the better of her—someone familiar taking the place of the husband she missed so much. She was so lonely lately that some days she cried all night. This Kael guy was the closest person to her husband, and I was the closest friend she had, so I needed to be on guard with him, making sure he was not just spying on his buddy’s pregnant wife. Soldiers did that more often than you’d think.