“I don’t . . .” Carly stopped, frustrated. The tears were bad enough. Everything wanted to spill. “I don’t think I should. But something happened last night. John . . .”

“John what?” Emma’s voice had gone hard.

Carly’s heart jumped up in her throat. This was getting away from her. “I can’t. It might be nothing. If it’s nothing and I start drama . . . And if it’s not nothing, then maybe I shouldn’t say anything at all, because I don’t know what will happen if I do.”

“Nothing happens just because you tell me something. It can be a secret, if you need it to be. What did John do?”

“If it’s bad, you might think you have to do something.” Carly let her eyes fall out of focus on the white field of her sketchbook. She was so tired.

“It’s all choices. You telling me or not. Or what I do about it—later today, next week, when I’m eighty. No matter what you tell me, if in fact you decide to tell me anything, I will not choose to do anything about it without discussing it with you first. Deal?”

Carly ached to talk, to let it come rushing out, to not be alone with what she wondered and worried about.

Emma took her hand away. “Carly, I want you to look at me.”

Emma raked her fingers through her hair at the temples, pulling the length of it back behind her shoulders. She sat straight on across from Carly, head level, completely face-to-face. She let it stay that way—a pose, a portrait—before she spoke again.

“You have a good eye for meaning. For intent. You keep surprising me with it when we talk about this stuff.” She pointed at the ever-present art books on the table. “So tell me, just from looking at me, do you believe me when I say that I know what it takes to keep a secret? Tell me if you can see that I know what it means.”

Carly couldn’t keep her eyes from drifting to the scars, as Emma fully intended. She’d stripped away the shyness of the moment with just the power of her voice, and Carly stared openly at the sunken trench where the point of Emma’s jaw should have been. The skin stretched over the cruel worst of it in a thick, shiny twist, and the damage transitioned past a pocked, warped margin into smooth skin, into what she was everywhere else. It hadn’t always been like that.

Carly nodded.

Emma nodded back. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Well then, Emma is not really my name.”

Carly felt a little drop, like a sudden swoop over a hill in a car.

“What is your name, then?”

“I’ll tell you, if it looks like we have to do anything about John.”

•  •  •

Emma took her hand away from her mouth.