Our footsteps were so loud on the pavement. Well, mine were. I don’t think he had any. And his voice didn’t echo between the buildings. He walked me up to the road, and we walked along beside all the closed shops.

“Just fancied a chat,” he said. “There aren’t many people I can talk to. I’m not sure if you remember where we first met. It was at the Flowers and Archers. The night of the second murder.”

I had no memory of this at all.

“It’s quite an unusual ability, what you have,” he said. “Part genetics, part dumb luck, something you can never talk about to any rational person. I remember the feeling.”

“You were—”

“Oh, yes. I was like you. It’s hard, I know. Upsetting. The dead aren’t supposed to be among the living. It offends the natural order of things. All I ever wanted to do in life was make sense of it. And now, here I am . . . part of the puzzle.”

He smiled at me.

I was cold from the inside out. My hair was cold. My thoughts were cold. It was as if every cell in my body stopped doing its cellular duty and stiffened in place. My blood became still and had no life-giving power, and my breath crystallized and pierced my lungs like shards of glass.

“Have you ever met any more like us?” he asked. “Or are you all alone in the world?”

Some impulse told me to lie to him. Telling him that I did meet some people and that they were the ghost police . . . It seemed like I was asking for more trouble than I was already in.

“Just some weirdos,” I said. “Back home.”

“Ah,” he said. “Some weirdos back home.”

A leaf drifted down from a tree and started to pass slowly through his shoulder on its way to the ground. He flinched a bit and brushed it away.

“Your name—Aurora. It’s very unusual. A family name?”

“My great-grandmother,” I said.

“It’s a name full of meaning. It’s the name of the Roman goddess of dawn and of the polar lights.”

I had Googled my own name before. I knew all this. But I decided not to interrupt him to tell him that I was aware.

“Also,” he added, “of a collection of diamonds right here in London, the Aurora Pyramid of Hope. Lovely name. It’s the largest collection of color diamonds in the world. You should see them under a UV light. Marvelous. Do you have any interest in diamonds?”

That’s when I saw Boo. She was walking toward us very casually, like she didn’t even see him, talking away loudly into her phone in what sounded like a pretend conversation. She must have seen me leave, or seen him. Whatever the case, she was here.