“I can’t drive a stick,” I said.

He laughed. “What are you going to do when we go to Europe?” he asked.

I looked at him like I had no idea who he was. I didn’t know who he was. My eyes felt huge. Europe might as well have been another planet.

I sat in the parking lot of Lowe’s like I was someone else. I parked far away, so no one would ding the sides of the Land Rover, even though I’d seen Bear drive it with total abandon. I had his keys on the bear lanyard and his credit card tucked into my wallet.

I clicked the key fob to lock the car and caught the eye of a woman going in ahead of me.

It’s not my car, I thought. It’s my …

The word I had meant to think of, the word I was having trouble admitting, was boyfriend.

But the word that actually came to mind was master.

When I got back, I went into the basement. In the model home, it was just another part of the house, not like the cellar in our house, which was dirt floor and stone walls with spiders bigger than I ever wanted to see again.

This was finished, with dark shining hardwood floors and walls that were flat white with primer. I needed to mask everything down there and get it ready for painting. But before Bear came to see what I was doing, I went into the workroom, where the floors were cement and there was a tool chest, a closet with hooks for hanging hammers and extension cords, and I hid my mother’s gun.

It had been in the back of the Land Rover, wrapped in Buddy’s blanket, for days. It was like a beating heart out there. I was always aware of it, always afraid Bear would find it and question me.

I thought, I could probably tell him.

But instead, I stood it up in the closet with a broom and mop in front of it.

I moved a box filled with picture frames that still had the fake photos in them. A pretty, copper-haired girl in a white sweater. A baby with creamy, perfect skin.

I laid plastic over the floor—the way you would if you were going to hide a body, I thought. But it was blue masking tape instead of duct tape, and my tools were brushes instead of knives. I anchored the plastic down with tape and the weight of the paint cans, and I stood on a ladder to mask the ceiling. But my hands were shaking, all the secrets coming to the surface—the hidden gun, Birdie. Every day I braced myself for the next thing. A dead body. The police. I kept peeling the tape off and starting over.

I woke up to an empty house, in the big white bed by myself. I was sprawled in the middle like a starfish, with Buddy curled into my side. I couldn’t ever quite stretch out in my twin bed at home; my hands and feet hung off either end. Bear’s room was light as soon as the sun came up, but I’d been asleep through hours of sunlight, the room warm and drowsy, the dog snoring.