“Hide the needle,” she whispered in his ear. Holding on to his shoulders, she leaned back, and Hudson caught a fleeting smile.

“You inject them?” he said. “With what?”

“Special K.”

“Ketamine?”

She nodded. “You’d be down by now,” she said, throwing a glance at the floor.

“And then what would you do?”

The smile was back, only barely. “Poke them with a stick.” She pressed her thumb to his neck. It hurt.

He turned his head but she didn’t stop. “Okay,” he said. But her eyes had gone onyx. She pressed harder, promising to leave a bruise with the whorls of her fingerprint. “Morgan, stop it!” He grabbed her arm.

She jerked, suddenly, as though she’d just touched a hot burner. When he looked into her eyes this time, he saw that they’d lightened back to their original jade. A teardrop fell from her lashes and slid down her cheek. She started to shiver.

“I made them symmetrical,” she said softly. The teardrop disappeared in the space between her parted lips. “As ugly on the outside as they were on the inside.”

Suddenly, Hudson understood. He thought back to his interviews with traumatized kids, the way they stared past him to mentally rearrange the objects in the room to achieve symmetry. Morgan had done the same thing with people, making their outsides match the depravity they hid inside themselves. Cautiously, he wiped away another teardrop. His thumb grazed the corner of her mouth. She opened it as though to speak, but no words came out. He leaned in to her, listening. She touched his neck again, gently this time, as though to assess what damage she’d done. Her cold fingertips slid under his shirt. He inhaled sharply at the sensation. The hair on his arms stood on end. He couldn’t help it. He leaned farther, desperate to be in her orbit.

“Don’t get too close,” she warned.

“Why?” But even as he asked it, he was beyond the point of no return.

With her mouth touching his, she whispered, “Because I bite.”

29 MORGAN

Morgan. My darling, my ruin.

Clive had a deep voice. Gravelly. She remembered now. It was as though all his sentiments had expiration dates; his voice started so far down inside him that by the time the words exited his mouth, they’d already begun to fade. An incessant reminder that her time with him was temporary. He would never spend more than a couple of hours with her and her mom. Except the one time they had gone up to the cabin in Loomis.

It was no wonder it felt familiar from the photos. She’d been there before, once. She was almost too young to remember, her mind a palimpsest of fond childhood memories buried by darker ones.

Her past came back to her like old scars being torn open.