He gives me a kiss before passing over the threshold and entering the room. “Why’d you lock the door?”

I think about Ruthie standing on the pedestal in the center of our circle on the quad. Pale and bruised. Wearing pure white no more.

“Just habit, I guess,” I say. “Sorry.”

He gets close to me, his face maybe an inch from mine, his breath a mix of minty toothpaste and fried over easy egg with hot sauce. “Stop apologizing,” he says. “It’s all good.”

He kisses my forehead, leaving a stinging circle where his lips were, like an itchy bug bite. It’s hard to kiss him when I’m thinking about her. And I always think about her up here. There’s something in the isolation that’s equally terrifying and riveting. It always brings me back to that night. Losing my virginity on the side of a red barn two minutes before Ruthie hoped to do the same. What happened to her could have happened to either of us. It was a toss-up which girl wouldn’t survive the night.

“You okay? You look so pale, babe. Can Lorraine make you something to eat?”

When I look up from my hands, Graham is standing in the doorway of the bathroom, a stark white towel tied around his waist, my toothbrush sticking out of his foamy mouth.

The Walkers are always taking things that aren’t theirs. Like they think their money and their notoriety gives them permission to take whatever they want.

“That’s my toothbrush,” I say.

He pulls it out of his mouth, looks at it like it’s a strange object that has yet to be identified by man, and shrugs before sticking it back between his lips. “Oh,” was all he could say. And barely that since his mouth was full of whitening toothpaste. He walks back into the bathroom and turns the shower on, the steam greeting me like a facial I didn’t want.

I lie back down on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, a crack from the heat forming directly above my head. If I’m lucky, the whole house will fall on top of us all.

Seeing Molly this morning was surprisingly tough. It made the whole thing real. It felt like she’d put my cold feet into blocks of cement, fastening me to this place until this ordeal is over. Until the wedding passes and I can move on.

“What time is it?” I ask Graham when he gets out of the shower, clean and dewy and hot.

“It’s almost six. Everyone’s starting to arrive at the hotel, so they’ll be heading up here soon. Lorraine said she’d help Molly’s team, since everything’s running a little early.”