“Do you know what kind of torture that is?” I asked Merry as I slid a pile of books onto the trolley. I’d barely slept a wink, and I’d let every possible conceivable question he might want to ask me run through my mind. I’d also talked pretty much non-stop at Merry since she arrived at work. By the way she’d stopped trying not to roll her eyes and sigh, I gathered she was over hearing about it. But this was driving me insane.

So as my best friend, it was only right she was driven up the wall too.

“Well, it’s not like waterboarding or the old bamboo under the fingernail kind of torture,” I allowed. “It’s more like a dripping tap that you can’t shut off. Like a constant drip, drip, drip. Or when you’re trying to think of the name of a song but you can’t because you can’t remember who sang it or any of the lyrics, only that you think it was in a movie where some guy holds up a stereo or fist pumps the air or something. Like that Simple Minds song and you could have sworn it was John Cusack in Say Anything, and you can’t think of it for days—it drives you motherfucking crazy—only to find out it was really Judd Nelson at the end of The Breakfast Club.”

Merry held up a book like it was a shield. “Do you know what my favourite part of a book is?” she asked, her face stoic. She didn’t give me time to change gears in the conversation.

“Huh?”

“My favourite part of any well-written book is that it will have a beginning,” she said. “And a middle, and a goddamn end, Jordan. An ending! Which is what this conversation is lacking. They’re magical. Maybe you can try it.”

“I hate you. And I take back what I said about your cardigan. It’s not cute. It’s hideous.”

“Of course it is.”

“Anyway, as I was saying, and this is the end so you can shut your taco-hole. He’s going to ask me something, and he’s given me twenty-four hours to think about all the possible scenarios. What if it’s something revoltingly embarrassing? I’ll need to change buses and possibly wear a disguise. Which brings me right back to his lack of social media presence. No one under the age of thirty doesn’t have some kind of social media thing. And Hennessy, the name. It sounds made up, doesn’t it? I’m convinced he’s in the witness protection program, in which case I’ll probably blow his cover. Or what if he’s actually an undercover cop? No,” I said, answering my own question. “They would have set up fake profiles as part of his new persona, surely.”