He didn’t tell her that she was right and that it didn’t matter. She’d never had what she thought anyway. He didn’t tell her she didn’t need to worry, that he’d be gone soon. As soon as strategically possible.

Roy’s stunt and what they were doing might even be a useful thing. It would keep Donna’s relentless strength in check. She wouldn’t bend the world to find him. She’d bend it the other way—to forget him. She wouldn’t say anything for fear of tonight coming back on her. She’d make it disappear. She’d done it before. She wouldn’t leave Carly vulnerable, losing her to whatever penalty this could carry.

It would work itself out. It always did.

John pulled on Donna’s kitchen gloves to dump half a fresh, unfingerprinted bottle of vodka down the drain. He packed the rest of his pills into a plastic bag, all props to press into Roy’s hands and decorate his dead lap. And he also brought a hose for the tailpipe, and the duct tape to hold it in place. Just in case.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

No ambulance was coming. Somehow Carly had known there wouldn’t be, but she was leaning against Ada’s bedroom window anyway, ear almost touching the screen, sifting the neighborhood sounds for the rising wail of sirens over her friend’s excited babble.

“Holy sh—” Ada’s eyebrows swooped up and she inhaled the it. “Was he dead?” Ada always swallowed the last sound in a cuss word like it didn’t count as much if she said it weird.

“I don’t know,” Carly said. But she kind of did.

Her babysitter’s dog had died when Carly was seven. She had been the one to find her. The dog was in her oval bed, lying on her side with her ever-present rope toy next to her muzzle. There was no blood. Nothing looked wrong. But Carly never for a second had thought the dog was merely sleeping. It was just different somehow.

The man in the hallway looked that kind of different. Untied. Empty.

Carly’s mother had told Ada’s mother that a friend of John’s had suffered a breakdown and had gotten into the house and tried to kill himself while they were all out to dinner.

Both women said the word suicide the way Ada said the word shit.

That recap was plausible, right up to the part where Donna said the guy was John’s friend. Uh-unh. John wasn’t holding a friend up off the floor. That was for sure. He’d been far more interested in what Donna and Carly thought of the whole scene than whether the guy piled against him was going to be okay.

For the first time in all of this weirdness, Carly had felt afraid of John.

She pleaded with her mother not to go back.