No. This song that he had been working on did not have Pachelbel’s chord progression at all. She wasn’t sure why she’d been so certain that it had. Her hands moved, as if she were trying to play on her cello, though she wasn’t certain if she wanted to play a harmony to his song—or Pachelbel.

Bereft of cello, she hummed its part in Pachelbel’s Canon—which was boring. She had done it so often that she felt as though the notes were engraved on her bones. People liked to listen to songs they knew, her orchestra teacher used to say. We’ll give our audience a few favorites among the unfamiliar pieces.

Everyone knew Pachelbel.

Zander stopped singing. “Anna, that’s rude,” he chided her. “Don’t sing something else while someone is singing.”

The tone of his voice set her back up. She had to remind herself that he was right. She pressed her hand on the glass as they drove past a hotel/campground on the river, and felt a sharp longing. She wished that she were sitting on a rock watching the river rush by instead of encased in this car heading into the darkness. It felt suffocatingly like the blackness was going to reach out and consume her.

She wasn’t afraid of the dark anymore, she reminded herself. I’ve met plenty of scary things in the light. She heard that last part ringing in her ears in her own voice. As if she’d said it more than once.

But she had been afraid of the dark when she was seventeen. She was seventeen now, right? She couldn’t remember when she’d learned to love the night.

Zander was singing again, and this time she politely hummed along with him. She preferred Pachelbel to the new tune, which was weird. There was nothing wrong with Zander’s song, and, like many cellists, she was really very tired of Pachelbel.

But the music was soothing, and humming it made her feel better. When Zander quit singing, he asked, “So, what is your favorite subject in school?”

As she answered, she forgot that she couldn’t remember how she happened to be traveling in the dark with a stranger who didn’t feel like a stranger. Or maybe with someone familiar who felt like a stranger.

She was seventeen and headed to Northwestern in the fall, the daughter of a lawyer. Other than her mother’s death, nothing bad had ever happened to her.

That was an odd thought, too. Why did she think something bad was going to happen to her quite soon?

“Tell me about your favorite family vacation,” Zander asked. Before she could answer, he muttered, “You are obstinate, aren’t you? I’ve never had this much trouble, especially not with someone my father has already caught. It’s like everything just wants to flow off the top.”