“I just wondered if you thought…” He pauses. “I mean … do you think there’s anything human left in them?”

I think of the dead girl on top of me. How empty she seemed.

“No.”

“So do you think they have souls?” The way Rhys asks it is different from the way Harrison asked it, like he’s not just idly wondering, but he really needs to know. “Because they die, but they come back.”

“The first death. The soul must go with it. They’re not people, Rhys.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I’m God.”

This actually gets a laugh out of him, a small one.

“I can’t stop thinking about it. They look so sad when they turn. Just in that second after. They look like they know what’s about to happen but there’s nothing they can do … and then the light goes out. But that’s why I wondered—just that second…”

“Your parents turned,” I say. “Didn’t they?”

I think I’ve always known. I wait for him to confirm it. He feels my eyes on him and he crumbles a little. At first, I think he’ll cry. He brings his hands to his eyes and stays so still and then he takes a shuddering breath out. When he lowers his hand, there are no tears.

“You were supposed to tell me how,” I remind him. “How you knew…”

So he does.

“The night … before it all really went to hell, a group of dead got into our house. Like six of them. We thought it was a break-in and one bit my dad. We got upstairs and locked ourselves in my parents’ bedroom and we called the police. The police came.” He pauses. “They were overwhelmed and we knew something had gone wrong, but not what or how, so we just thought we’d wait it out in the room until it was safe or backup came. We barricaded the door. My dad was like—he was sick, but we thought he was just upset … and then he said he felt cold.”

I wonder what infection feels like from the inside. If you can sense yourself becoming ice. And your emotions and memories too—they become ice, and you turn and then you’re free.

The way I’m thinking about this is still all wrong and romantic …

“Near the end, he said he didn’t want to hurt us. It’s like he knew it was … it’s like he knew it was taking him over. And then his heart stopped. And then he came back. He bit my mom and I knew what I had to do. The only thing we had in that room were his golf clubs.” He takes a deep breath. “Her bite wasn’t so bad. She was lucid … longer. I thought maybe if it was small, it wouldn’t count. But in the end she got cold too.”

“You killed them both.”

“I didn’t even wait for her to turn,” he whispers.