Trevor had been so weird because Trevor had been pretending he wasn’t grieving.

It was midnight before I could ask the question. I was curled up in the loveseat near Kelli’s perch, which allowed me to gaze occasionally out the window at the golden pools the streetlights cast along the sidewalk. The street was very quiet, as it had been — or at least as it had appeared to me to be — the night Mr. Gill’s garage was vandalized. From where I sat I had a perfect view of his house. He’d installed a large, bright spotlight above his garage — an eye-watering LED that glared, unblinking, throughout the night.

We held our drinks in our laps and I was relieved to be able to nurse mine now. Trevor was too far away, seated in my mother’s rocking chair on the opposite side of the coffee table, to swoop in and top me off. He’d brought the rum and cola along and, efficiently, had even filled a cereal bowl with ice cubes so we wouldn’t have to get up and go to the kitchen when it came time to freshen our drinks.

I’d been sipping but now I took a gulp and felt the fizz and liquor burn a slow trail down my throat and sit glowing in the pit of my stomach.

“Did my mother,” I said, “ever talk to you about me?”

Trevor leaned back and the springs of the old cushioned rocking chair he was sitting in thrummed. He sipped his drink and for a moment seemed to be looking around for a cup holder in the armrest. When he couldn’t find it, he cradled the drink in front of his crotch.

“Well, Miss Karie —”

“Could you start calling me Karen?”

Trevor’s face went blank. “I don’t know if I could,” he said, startled.

“It’s my name,” I said. “To be honest the ‘Miss’ thing drives me a little . . . I don’t like it.”

“It’s just —” said Trevor. “I always feel a bit strange calling ladies by their first name. Feels a little . . . informal.”

This made me smile. Trevor, whose problem was that he presumed too much, gave the women in his life these twee little nicknames because he didn’t want to be presumptuous.

“You can be informal with me,” I said. “I just found out you’re basically my secret brother — you can call me by my name.”

“Karen,” said Trevor, frowning. I knew what he was thinking, and he was right. It didn’t work.

“Or,” I said, “why don’t you just keep calling me Karie. Like Kelli does.”

Trevor nodded. He still looked uneasy, but Karie was clearly better. “Good-good,” he said, then tried it out. “Karie.”

And then he said it in a different way. “Karie,” he began. I looked up from my drink and he was leaning forward in the chair now, holding his juice glass between his knees, face sombre, about to tell me what I’d asked to know.