If there hadn’t been a camera in the foyer, though, or if he’d asked beforehand and her mother had said no, the video wouldn’t exist. Carly would never have known what really happened. That guy pushing her, grabbing her, trying to—Come on, NO, don’t think about that. Her taking him down and getting away. Everything was always going to be different after what had happened. Carly thought of Mrs. Carmichael.

But without seeing it, without really knowing, it might not have been a good change in her.

While John and her mother were arguing, Carly had replayed the video over and over on her phone from the police website. Without John and his bad decision, she wouldn’t have had that jolt, the radioactive spider bite that made her feel so electric tonight. Everything was sharp. Everything glowed. Everything sounded so clear.

It wasn’t right, what John had done and how he was acting. Was a lie of omission as bad as a regular lie? She didn’t know. And she also didn’t know for sure that there weren’t other kinds of lies in the story as well. Hearing and listening had become slightly different tools in the last few hours.

John said there was a man who’d stalked him when he lived in San Diego. But he said “San Diego” as if the words were unfamiliar in his mouth. He said that the man was a nut, a pitiful loser, but that he didn’t want to ruin the poor guy’s life if it was something John could handle on his own. So he’d put in the cameras and monitored them closely.

John said the man wasn’t a danger to Carly or her mother, but Carly heard a wrong note. The peg turned. He didn’t believe it when he said it. Of that, she was sure.

Carly’s phone lit up with two notifications, and another as she read the screen. Her friends were starting to check in: Is that YOU?!?!

The video had jumped into the social media stream.

CHAPTER FOUR

Once the police explained to John what had happened at his house, he’d kept one track of panic running, and one of face management. Hours of concentrating against looking too worried to the police, or not worried enough to Donna and Carly, was just about to the limit of his talent.