IT WAS A LONG NIGHT, AND I WASN’T SURE WHAT WAS worse—the terror I was just managing to keep at bay or the boredom. We sat in that study room for six straight hours. Boo tried to keep me entertained by reading to me about celebrities, mostly English ones that I’d only recently learned the names of. My butt went numb from sitting. My back hurt from the chair. The air in the tiny study room got stale, and I grew to hate the powder blue walls.

It seemed to me that things should be more dramatic—not just sitting around with the ever increasing weight of time on my shoulders.

“You can go to sleep if you want,” Boo said, just after one in the morning. “Not to bed, but if you want to lie down.”

“No.” I shook my head. “I can’t do that.”

She rolled herself back and forth in her chair.

“You’ve seen Callum and me, yeah?” she asked.

I wasn’t sure what this question meant. I’d seen Callum, and I’d seen Boo.

“Do you think . . .” Again, she said fink instead of think. “Okay. I . . . I really like him. I have for the whole time, yeah, but I’ve had no one to tell. One year with no one to tell. And maybe he just doesn’t think we can date because we work together. The two of them, they take it harder, you know? They were more messed up by whatever happened to them. Callum’s angry. And Stephen . . . well, Stephen is Stephen.”

This sudden insight into Boo’s love life was confusing.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“He’s smart—like, proper smart. He went to Eton. Proper posh. But something about him . . . I mean, I know something bad happened. I know he doesn’t talk to his family. He doesn’t do anything outside of this job. I mean, they must have picked him for a reason to be the person to restart it all. And I love Stephen. I do. I didn’t ever think I’d have a friend as posh as him, you know? He’s dead sweet. He just has no life. He reads. He makes phone calls. He sits in front of his computer. I don’t know if he has hormones.”

There was something in what Boo was saying. Of all the guys I’d ever met, Stephen seemed the most . . . I wasn’t sure what the word was. But I took Boo’s point. You never got the feeling that Stephen had those kinds of thoughts.