“I believe you.” She looked down. “This is probably weird but I want to give you some money. To try and make it even. I mean, I know it’ll never be even. Nothing’s ever even. But if you’d given my phone to Ridley you’d have twenty thousand dollars. So I owe you twenty thousand dollars. That’s how I see it.”

Trevor wasn’t surprised.

“Why didn’t you just pay my bail?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“My bail. In Martha’s Vineyard.” Claudia looked confused. Was she playing dumb? “They arrested me for being at your house. They weren’t going to let me out if I didn’t pay two thousand dollars. That probably sounds like nothing to you but I don’t have it. I don’t think my parents do, either.”

“I didn’t know,” she said quietly.

“You didn’t know because you didn’t care.”

“That’s not true. I told them I’d said you could be there. We told them to drop the charges.”

“Okay, but did you, like, call to follow up? To make sure I wasn’t still sitting in jail?”

“I didn’t know I needed to.”

He didn’t say, If it was Ben, you’d have made sure he was out. You’d have called and called until you knew he was free. What did it matter now?

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Trevor sighed. “It’s okay.” And maybe it was. Not good, not what he wanted, but okay. “I know you’ve got a lot to deal with.”

“You could have called me,” she said.

“I thought about it. But I didn’t end up having to call anybody. Ridley Drake paid the bail. Then he drove me home.” Claudia’s mouth dropped open. “He’s scared of you. He offered me ten thousand dollars for information about your family.”

“What kind of information?”

“He wants to know if you’re going to show the video to the cops or the media. I think he probably wants to be prepared. Get his lawyer-shit together. I told him to fuck off.” He paused. “I don’t think I should be taking money from any of you.”

Claudia winced. “I get it.”

City noises filled the silence that followed. An ambulance on a nearby street; the rat-a-tat of construction a few houses down.

“Have you heard anything about Jeremy?” Trevor asked.

“Sort of,” she said, and told a story about Jeremy’s brother at the Port Authority, and how he’d come to the town house, with a gun.

“Nobody got hurt,” she said. “And the lawyer thinks it’s actually kind of a good thing for us.”

“Us?”