Jasper glances back at me from the front seat, where Leo insisted he ride. Riel is in the back next to me. These are their precautions. What purpose they serve, I’m not sure. But I knew better than to argue.

Jasper is worried about me. He is worried about himself. I can feel that so clearly it’s almost like he is shouting it at me. He is hoping that I’m right that we should go with these excellent liars. I am, too.

“Where are we going?” Jasper asks when we have driven in silence for more than fifteen minutes.

“My grandparents have a house on Cape Cod,” Riel says, like this explains everything. “We can’t stay in Cambridge. Thanks to you bringing Kendall—”

“I didn’t bring Kendall,” I say. “He sent me.”

“Whatever,” she says, but more mildly. Like she knows the difference and maybe even believes me, but is also determined not to change her negative opinion of me in general. “Somebody else came by, too. Somebody we didn’t know. Could have been a coincidence, but I don’t think so. We were on borrowed time in Cambridge.”

Riel rests her head against the window, eyes toward the darkness.

“Why are you helping us now?” I ask. Her change of heart is nagging at me.

She closes her eyes. Shrugs. “Because I can,” she says. And for a second she lets me feel her guilt. “Because you need me to.”

I WAKE UP disoriented and cloudy. I don’t know how long I was out, but we are now in the middle of the tall Bourne Bridge, arced high above the water. When I was little, crossing that bridge was always the dividing line between the Cape and civilization, between life and summer bliss. I wonder now what waits for me on the other side.

Soon we are snaking along Route 6, which runs the length of the Cape. I recognize it, too. I try to hold tighter to my old sense of this special place—of sand and dried pines and hermit crabs and biking on the rail trail—but it’s already slipping away.

A few minutes later we turn off onto a much narrower paved road, which turns quickly into a dirt one, we bump slowly along. Another minute or two more, and I see water through a break in the trees up ahead. We hit a wooden bridge too fast, our tires rumbling hard over wooden planks. My teeth rattling.

“It’s one of the little private islands,” Riel says, like we all spend a fair amount of time in such glamorous places.