“Daniel, what the hell?” she hisses.

Daniel spins and frowns at her. He rushes forward and grabs her arm, pulling her back inside. “What are you doing?” he says.

When they close the door behind them, Lynell yanks her arm out of his grasp. “I woke up and you were gone! I didn’t know where you were.”

He sets the bag down and sighs. “You were asleep. I thought I’d be back before you woke up. It’s just seven.” Daniel leans down and fishes through the bag. He grabs a bottle of pills and hands them up to Lynell. “I went back to Alan’s,” he says.

“What?” she gasps. “Someone could’ve seen you. They could have people watching the house!”

“They didn’t.” Daniel holds up his hands and shrugs. “You needed painkillers, and we need clothes and food. I didn’t have any more money and the house is close, so I chanced it.”

“You chanced it?”

“I watched the house for half an hour before I went in. No one saw me.”

Lynell looks down at a bottle of pills, the pain maximizing now that she realizes there’s a form of relief just moments away. She looks back to Daniel, who watches her with tired, glassy eyes. “You didn’t sleep at all,” she says.

He shakes his head. “I was keeping a lookout and trying to contact Zach and then at five-thirty, I decided I could pretend to be on a run and go back to the house. I’m sorry you woke up alone.”

She stares at him through her eyelashes before sighing. “You need to sleep for a few hours. Teach me how to use the watch and I’ll stay up.”

“No, I’ll—”

“Daniel Carter, if you don’t sleep, then you’ll pass out and be useless to me.”

He laughs. “Fine.” He picks up the bag and takes out four bottles of water, a bag of crackers, a can of beans, half a loaf of bread, an old apple, chips, two towels, one of Lynell’s old T-shirts, and two sweaters, one of hers from high school and one of Alan’s.

“How did you fit so much in that bag?” Lynell asks, squatting next to Daniel and grabbing the old T-shirt and shoes. The shirt is thin and gray with a badger on the front, her high school mascot. She remembers when they gave them out at school; she was so excited, up until Alan yelled at her for buying something she didn’t need. He wouldn’t listen to her explain it was free.

“Magic,” Daniel says, wiggling his fingers in the air. Lynell grins, pushing her shoulder against his. She pulls off her dirty shirt and replaces it with the new one. It’s stiff from years of sitting in a drawer but still feels much cleaner. Daniel hands her the apple and tells her to eat it. “I had one on the walk over,” he says when she argues about him needing it too. Lynell concedes and sinks her teeth into the sweet fruit. She finishes the entire thing while Daniel walks her through using the watch to contact Zach. “Make sense?” he asks, fastening the watch onto her wrist.