“It’s amazing, the way I can tell when she wants to kiss without her even saying it first,” Imogen gushed. “It’s like I can hear her entire body asking me.” Emma’s heart raged, an overfull river, but Imogen couldn’t see that. “Rush is always so quiet, but her body’s not quiet at all. It’s making music and talking to me and shouting. When I kiss her, all of that pours into me.”

“Please don’t tell me more,” Emma said, a strained whisper.

Imogen was free, and she was choosing someone else. Someone who could be with her in a way that Emma never could.

Danny: Now

Ihold my breath as Rush steers the Deathmobile one-handed through town, past the shops and the school and then a little farther, sliding us into the dirt tracks alongside the cemetery.

When she stops the car, I get out. Fast.

“What are we doing here?” I ask, pretending I haven’t already followed her to this exact place. It’s an old patch of graves, barely cared for. The wildness at the edges is gnawing inward, toward the center. A little fence pretends to be the boundary, but mostly it’s an excuse for wildflowers to grow along the posts. The headstones aren’t planted in rows, but wherever people thought to put them. Some are the old-fashioned kind with grimacing angels. In one corner is a little blocked-off section where the stones are tall and white and wafer-thin, all done in the same stark style.

“I met Imogen here,” Rush says, her soft voice blanketing the cemetery.

“Of course you did,” I mutter. It would never be something boring with Imogen.

“And this,” Rush says, popping the trunk and letting it whine open, “is why I don’t let the Grays ride in my car. They would find what I keep in here.”

“You mean the bodies?” I ask.

It’s the worst possible thing to say, but somehow it earns me a quiet laugh.

Rush pulls out a black cloth case by a handle. It’s as wide as a body, with curves even more dramatic than hers. When she sets it to the ground, it clunks in a distinctly wooden way.

“Is that . . . ?”

“A cello,” she confirms. “I don’t really play much anymore, unless I’m upset. It’s like comfort food. I used to come here because I thought I wasn’t good enough for living audiences yet. I made dead people listen to me instead. They had to deal with a lot of Dvořák.”

She finds a headstone to sit on, not setting her full weight against it but leaning so gently that I can’t imagine the person buried there minds at all. She unzips the cello from its case, peels away the cover, and centers it between her bare legs.