This was no snake. This was a thousand pounds of pressure.

“Remember how I said I had a boating accident?” Stephen said, breaking my train of thought. “It’s not true.”

He adjusted something on his tactical vest nervously.

“When I first met Callum and he asked me what happened, I started to tell him the story, which starts in a boathouse. But then I changed my mind. He just assumed I had a boating accident, and I never corrected him. I’ve said boating accident ever since.”

“So what really happened?” I asked.

“My family is fairly wealthy. They aren’t kind, or functional. We may have had a lot of things growing up, but a warm family life wasn’t one of them. When I was fourteen, my older sister died of an overdose. It appeared to be accidental—she was out partying in London. The autopsy showed she had large amounts of both heroin and cocaine in her system. She was seventeen.”

This was the kind of thing you should say something in response to, but given our circumstances, I felt it was okay to remain silent.

“She died on a Saturday. By the following Thursday, my parents sent me back to school and they went to St. Moritz on a skiing trip to ‘get their minds off things.’ That was how my family dealt with the death of their daughter. They sent me off, and they skied. For three years, I just tried to block everything else out. I studied. I did sports. I was the perfect student. I never let myself stop for one second to think about what had happened. Years of just blocking it out. Then, when I was in my last weeks of school and had been accepted to Cambridge, I realized it was the first time I really had nothing to do, nothing to work toward. And I started to think—all the time. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. And I got angry. And I got sad. All the things I thought I’d kept out of my mind, they were all there, waiting for me. I was captain of the rowing team, so I had access to the boathouse. One night in early June, I went in, got a rope, and threw it over one of the beams . . .”

He didn’t need to go any further. I got the idea.

“You tried to kill yourself,” I said. “You must have failed. Because you’re here. Wait. You’re not a ghost, are you? Because that would totally destroy my mind right now.”

“I didn’t fail,” he said. “I was interrupted in the middle of the process.”

He took the keys from the ignition and put them in a pocket on his vest.