It was Tyler. It was just Tyler. She opened the door and leaned against the doorjamb for support.

“Tyler! What the hell? You scared me.” Her knees were shaking but the rattling of her heart began to subside. “What are you doing here?”

Tyler was wearing a Newburyport Clippers Lacrosse T-shirt, jeans, and a Red Sox baseball hat. Under the glow of the porch lights—she had decided to keep them on, after much internal debate—his eyes were bloodshot and at half-mast. Pot eyes. “I just wanted to talk to you,” he said. “Can I come in?”

Alexa thought about Caitlin. He’s pretty broken up about how things ended with the two of you. She looked in the driveway, and out on the street. She didn’t see his car. She stepped aside, and Tyler entered the house. She closed and locked the door behind him. “How’d you get here?”

“I walked. I was downtown.”

“By yourself?”

“Yeah. I mean, I was with some of the guys. But they all stayed down there.” He leaned in, too close. “So what’s really going on with you and that golfer kid?”

She stiffened. There was something she didn’t like in Tyler’s voice. She didn’t like the way he was looking at her—it was more of a sneer, actually.

“Nothing,” she said. “We just hang out sometimes.” The sneer deepened, and Tyler stepped toward her. She backed away.

“I know you’re lying. I know where he lives too. Off Turkey Hill. I’m going to go talk to him.”

“Talk to Cam? About what?”

“About you.”

“How’re you going to talk to him? You walked here. Are you going to walk all the way out to Turkey Hill? That’s like three miles.” She crossed her arms and she was briefly so irritated that she almost forgot to be scared.

“Can I take your car?”

“No. Of course not. No way. Anyway, mine has a flat. I’m driving my mom’s.”

“Can I take your mom’s car?”

“Definitely not.”

And here was where things got complicated. Tyler had known Alexa and her family for a long time. He’d been in this house, what, zillions of times. He knew where they kept the extra toilet paper and the backup pool towels and the Cap’n Crunch her mother bought for Tyler to have as a snack, dry, by the handful. He knew that you had to pull up on the handle of the door that led to the back patio to lock it and that the window screen in Alexa’s bedroom fell out when a stiff wind blew. He knew that car keys went inside the small blue bowl on the hall table that came from Fireside Pottery in Maine, and that was where he reached, before Alexa could stop him.

“Tyler. Give me the keys. You can’t just take my mom’s car.”