I was sure, at first, that her we was due to the ringing in my ears. Or the beginning of a sonic concussion. Or maybe her brother—

  But then a guy slipped out of the crowd, slung an arm around Millie, and kissed her on the cheek.

  I kid you not: Bobby actually stepped between Keme and Millie.

  “LOUIS, STOP!” Millie said, but with so much giggling that Louis—and everyone else—knew she didn’t mean it.

  Louis was tall. He was broad shouldered. He was practically naked except for a pair of tiny leather shorts and matching boots, and I love Bobby, and he’s the most handsome man I’ve ever met, and he’s everything to me, but Louis looked like a hundred and eighty pounds of chiseled beef. The only hint at what his costume might have been was a pair of devil horns poking up from the artful bedhead of blond hair.

  He was, I noticed with a rising flood of inexplicable anger, kissing Millie again. And she was giggling. Again.

  With chilly politeness, Indira asked, “Millie, who’s this?”

  Not quite under their breath, Fox said, “What’s this?”

  “LOUIS, STOP!” But it was a kind of pleased vexation rather than genuine annoyance. Millie caught his hand and yanked him a step closer. “I want you to meet my FRIENDS!”

  Here’s the deal: I’m a terrible person. I know that. I accept that. Which is why my biggest question was why Millie’s, uh, enthusiasm hadn’t driven Louis off. I considered the possibility that he was going to steal her kidneys. Or her trust fund. (Even though I knew Millie didn’t have a trust fund.) Or—and I know this makes me a truly awful person—maybe he was closeted, and Millie was a great beard.

  “He’s probably a serial killer,” Fox murmured, as though answering my thoughts.

  But then I noticed how Louis was looking at Millie. Like, looking at her. I’m not a prude (although I am only thirteen years old inside, and I get squirmy if I have to see too much kissing), but I felt my face heat, and I had to fix my gaze on a safe, neutral spot. Which happened to be Indira’s face. And she happened to look like she was ready to grab Fox’s cauldron and start swinging.

  “This is Dash,” Millie said, “and Bobby—oh he’s a DEPUTY!—and Indira, and Fox, and Keme. They’re my BEST FRIENDS!”

  Louis was already shaking hands, smiling at us with perfect teeth. “What’s up, Dan? Great rat costume.”

  “It’s Dash, actually, and I’m not a rat—”

  “He’s a ferret with a dandruffy tail,” Fox informed everyone.

  “He’s not—” Bobby tried.

  “Oh! You know how you cut up old towels and turn them into rags? That’s what he is.”

  “I’m wearing cute ears, gray sweats, and a tail—” I began.

  But by then, Louis was already on to Bobby. He held up his free hand in surrender. “I’m innocent! Don’t arrest me! Just kidding.”

  Bobby isn’t the most expressive guy in the world, but I knew him well enough to recognize the control he was exercising.

  Instead of a handshake, Louis pulled Indira toward him when he took her hand. “God, you look like such a mom. I totally need a mom hug right now.” And then he hugged her. And then he ROCKED HER (yes, italics and capitalization). If Indira enjoyed being pressed up against all those tightly defined muscles, her face didn’t get the message. Maybe she—like me—was still trying to wrap my head around being told, You look like such a mom.

  Fox got a casually dismissive “Your costume is hilarious,” which made Fox look like they were about five seconds away from taking a pair of goggles off their boots and strangling Louis with them.

  And then Louis got to Keme. Louis stuck out his hand. Keme stared back; his own hands were tucked under his arms, and his expression was an empty, frozen mask. After a few seconds, Louis laughed, pulled his hand back, and said, “Why the long face, little guy?”

  Keme didn’t move, not exactly. But probably only because Bobby was already there, one hand on Keme’s shoulder.

  “Louis’s a senior at Arcadia,” Millie said. “He’s a PHILOSOPHY MAJOR. Louis, you should talk to DASH. He LOVES books. HE WRITES MYSTERIES.”

  “Nice, Dan.” Louis clapped me on the arm. “Love a fun little mystery. Kind of like dessert after reading a real book, you know?” Before I could respond to that—heck, before I could finish having an aneurysm—Louis said, “Babe, I just saw Ty and Dylan. We’ve got to get over there and get smashed.” Already towing Millie into the crowd, he gave a quick farewell wave back with a Colgate smile. Millie beamed at us. And then the crowd swallowed them, and they were gone.

  I turned. Words were already coming—some combination of Let’s not get worked up and What is that guy’s deal? and then fifteen seconds straight of bleep-censoring. But I stopped when I saw Keme’s face. Rage tightened his features. He wasn’t staring after Millie. He wasn’t looking anywhere. It was a thousand-yard-stare, and at the other end of it, behind all that anger, I couldn’t see Keme. Not really.

  Then he twisted free of Bobby’s grip, plunged into the mess of bodies, and disappeared.

  Chapter 2

  “I’m worried about him,” I said as I shucked my jacket, then my tee. (This one had the Atari logo against a green grid.) I heeled off my Mexico 66s and dropped my jeans. Then, standing there in nothing but my Bowser boxers, I shivered and started picking through a drawer. “No one’s heard from him.”

  After the encounter with Millie and Louis—not to mention Keme running off—we’d limped through another half hour of the town’s festivities before calling it quits. We’d come back to Hemlock House, and we’d each found our own ways of spending the rest of the day. I, for example, had taken a perverse pleasure in slowly deleting each letter of the chapter I’d written that morning.

  Sitting on our bed, Bobby was already down to a pair of white boxers, and he was tugging on a sleep shirt. As the fabric passed over his head, he said, “He’ll be okay.”

  “I don’t know about that, actually.” My search for pajamas forgotten, I wrapped my arms around myself and leaned against the drawer. “Bobby, you saw his face. He was heartbroken. Scratch that, he was devastated.”

  Bobby’s head popped free of the shirt. He finished pulling it on, and then he smoothed his hair. The movement was automatic, and it was such a Bobby movement that I could have drawn it in my sleep. (If I’d had any artistic talent. Which I don’t.) He seemed to consider my statement for a moment. And then he nodded.

  “And where is he?” I asked.

  “Do you want to go look for him?” Bobby asked.

  “I don’t know. Should we?”

  Bobby’s pause was longer this time. “Keme knows where we are. If he wanted to be with us, he’d be here. I think he needs some time alone.”

  “But he’s not thinking clearly. He’s hurt. And I know he’s eighteen now, but he’s basically still a kid, and he’s out there, and it’s cold—” I couldn’t say any more. And even though Hemlock House was snug and warm—well, as snug and warm as a Class V haunted mansion could be—I shivered as goose bumps broke out up my arms and across my shoulders.

  Bobby stood and came across the room. He wrapped me in a hug. He was warm. He was solid. His breath tickled my neck. As he rubbed my back, I slowly relaxed into his embrace.

  “Keme’s going to be okay,” he said again. “You’re right—this is going to be hard for him. But he’ll get over it.”

  I shook my head. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to put into words what I was feeling. I knew it was more than a crush that hadn’t worked out. I knew it meant more to Keme than that. But I didn’t know how to explain it, so I settled for that simple, silent shake of my head.

  “Everybody goes through their first heartbreak,” Bobby said. One of his hands settled at the small of my back, above the elastic waistband of my boxers. “We all make it to the other side.”

  The only thing I could think to say was “He loves her.”

  “And he knows she loves him too,” Bobby said. “But not in the same way.”

  He was referring to the night of Keme’s eighteenth birthday, when Bobby and I had accidentally witnessed the moment when Keme overheard Millie describe him to her friends using the words: like my little brother. At the time, I’d thought maybe that would put an end—however painful—to Keme’s unrequited feelings. But in the months since, Keme hadn’t changed his behavior around Millie, and it was obvious to everyone (or at least to me) that Keme had decided to keep hoping and trying.

  Until today.

  That half-formed thought floated up again, but since I still couldn’t put it into words, I settled for an unhappy sigh.

  “If you want me to go look for him,” Bobby said, and he kissed my cheek, “I will.”

  After several long seconds, I shook my head. “If he knew I sent you after him, he’d kill me.”

  Bobby pulled me closer. He rubbed one hand up and down my back, then sideways, then up and down again. The fingers of his other hand curled around my waistband.

  “I know you’re going to think I’m making this up,” I said. “But I swear one time I saw his eyes turn red.”

  Bobby kissed my shoulder.

  “Like the Terminator,” I said.

  “Dash?”

  “Hm?”

  “Pay attention,” he said and kissed the spot where my neck joined my shoulder.

  The thing about sex with Bobby was that it was just so good. I mean, I don’t want to go on and on about it. (See above, about my inner thirteen-year-old.) But it was so easy, and everything felt natural. Sometimes, it was playful—Bobby, for all his stoicism and reserve and iron self-control, seemed to find an outlet for all those bottled-up emotions when we were together like this. And sometimes it was slower, sweeter, like drop after drop of honey filling me up. And sometimes it was fast and frantic because a certain deputy had needs and also wanted to be at work on time. (I’m not complaining.)

  Tonight, it was slow. Bobby guided me over to the bed, kissing his way up my neck to my jaw, then to my mouth. He eased my glasses off, lowered me onto the mattress, and crawled up next to me, still kissing me, his hand sliding up my belly, following my chest, curving along my arm. Exploring me by touch first. And then his mouth followed. The front of his T-shirt hung down, pulled by gravity, and it was easy to slip my hand up there and find the densely compact muscle. I mean, my God, he had abs. Louis who?

  “I love you,” Bobby whispered as he nuzzled my ear. His tongue darted out, and I made a sound you can’t make in church.

  My own voice was decidedly breathy as I said, “I love you too.”

  Bobby hesitated, and then he said, “I love you so much, Dash. I’m so happy with you.”

  Until then, my eyes had been half-closed as I focused on letting myself feel the attention Bobby was lavishing on me. Now I opened them.

  By his own admission, Bobby had never been good at talking about his feelings. And he’d told me enough, dropped enough hints, that I figured a lot of it had to do with his parents, and with how he’d been brought up. One of the things he’d been working on—we’d been working on—was putting those feelings into words. So, for him to say it again, and to say more, was Bobby taking a risk. And I had to blink to clear my eyes.

  “I love you too,” I said. It came out scratchy, but it was the best I could do. “I love you more than anyone I’ve ever known.”

  He smiled. Only a hint of a tremble at the edges. His hands stroked slowly up and down my thighs. “You’re so beautiful. Sometimes I look at you, and I can’t understand how I got so lucky. Everything about you turns me on. I was going crazy today, watching you, thinking about how long I had to wait until I got to touch you like this.” He bent and kissed my knee. “I want to keep you in bed all day and kiss every inch of you.”

  My first, automatic reaction was to laugh. Somehow—barely—I swallowed it. For a few seconds, the volume on my inner monologue went all the way up. I’m not beautiful. I’m skinny, except where I’m not. I’ve got a bunch of moles. My skin is pasty white—blindingly white, as a matter of fact, when I take my shirt off. My hair alternates between angry hedgehog and the junior lesbian guild. And in contrast to all of that, Bobby is, well, perfect—the perfect body, the perfect hair, the rich, earthy bronze of those eyes. I swear to God, in the year plus that I’d known him, Bobby had never once had so much as a blemish.

  After a few deep breaths, though, I cranked the volume down. I smiled up at Bobby. This was about him, I told myself. This was really about him. Because he was being so brave. I mean, he was always more communicative when we were intimate, but this was clearly Bobby stretching himself, working at putting into words the things he wanted to tell me.

  But the urge rose up inside me to laugh—or to say something silly that would defuse the tension, a joke, something that would box up everything he’d said into nice, conveniently disposable packages. Something like I guess I’m lucky you’re into zombie chic. Or better, If you like this, you should see me with my shirt on.

  I didn’t, though. I let the urge pass through me. And then I gave a wobbly smile. I sat up, kissed Bobby, and said, “You’re perfect. Did you know that?”

  He opened his mouth to say something, but I kissed him again, turned him out of his shirt, and—

  Well, the rest, as they say, is history.

  One of the perks of being an author (and there aren’t many) is that you get to set your own hours. Which means you get to set your own schedule. Which means nobody can tell you that one o’clock in the afternoon is an irresponsible wake-up time because you are an author, and your schedule is dictated by the muse. (It’s also dictated by how many episodes of Below Deck you stream before Netflix self-destructs.)

  All of which is to say that I woke up a little past noon. (One o’clock is only a tiny bit past.) Bobby was already long gone to work, and the house was quiet. I showered and dressed—joggers and a Dungeons & Dragons T-shirt that showed a twenty-sided die and the words NATURAL TWENTY. (I bought it in a bubble of unregulated self-confidence, which Fox and Keme had immediately popped by telling me all the ways I was not a natural twenty—apparently, they had objections about my calves.)

  Indira wasn’t in the kitchen or the servants’ dining room. There was no sign of Millie or Fox. I snagged a cardamom roll that Indira had left for me (okay, I snagged two), and headed back upstairs.

  Over the past year, Keme had not-so-secretly moved into Hemlock House. None of us had made a big deal out of it because: a) we were all terrified of Keme, and b) we knew he’d stonewall us if we tried, and c) honestly, it was better than what he’d been doing before I’d come to Hastings Rock, which was sleep on Indira’s floor occasionally, and otherwise spend the night God only knew where. The timber yard was apparently one of the places. Home—with his mom—was not.

  Keme’s makeshift room was located in one of the old house’s turrets, and it was only accessible via a secret passage. A few months ago, when I’d realized he had nothing but a sleeping bag on the floor, I’d started coming up with reasons to “store” furniture in the attic. So, now Keme had a bed and sheets and matching nightstands and several lamps. He had a desk, he had two pairs of slippers he’d stolen from Bobby, and he had a set of plastic drawers—the kind college kids put in their dorms—to store his clothes. (Those were definitely not original to Hemlock House. I’d bought them and then lied and stuffed them in the attic.) Industrious wasn’t exactly a word I’d used to describe Keme. As a matter of fact, he’d once bullied me into getting him a glass of water because he was deep into Fortnite and didn’t want to get up. (Also, because he’d eaten a million of my Takis.) But to judge by how much furniture the boy had moved on his own, there was a little worker bee inside him waiting to, um, get out. (That was definitely not a saying, but I just made it one.)

  All told, I was actually kind of jealous of Keme’s room. It was snug, tucked up under the roof with a sloping ceiling, and it had a beautiful view out the turret windows of the waves breaking against the cliffs. The sound was muffled up here, barely more than a whisper. It was nice, to feel like you were so high nothing could touch you. Maybe he liked that, feeling like—for a few hours every day—he was above it all.

  A quick check told me Keme wasn’t in his room, and there was no indication he’d come home overnight. I went back downstairs and ate another cardamom roll.

  That little part of me that never stopped worrying—okay, that huge part of me that never stopped worrying—couldn’t stop worrying about Keme. Part of it had to do with him not coming home, but I knew (or at least I wanted to recognize) that he’d been taking care of himself long before I’d come here. And while the October nights were cold, they weren’t freezing, and he wasn’t in any danger of anything except the usual perils of roughing it. (Which, for me, included the possibility of spiders. I am not. a. fan.)

  But it was more than that. I was worried about Keme, and it was bigger than the fact that he’d spent a night away from Hemlock House. I was worried his heart was broken after seeing Millie with Louis. And I was worried, because he was a boy, he wouldn’t know what to do with all that hurt, and so instead of dealing with it in a healthy way, he’d do something stupid. (Yes, I am speaking from experience, thank you for asking.) And there was something else, something I still couldn’t put into words. Something about Keme. And what it meant for him to lose Millie. I mean, for heaven’s sake, it made me sick to my stomach to see this rift between Millie and Keme—how much worse would it be for him? (The sick-to-my-stomach thing had nothing to do with my fifth cardamom roll. Sugar is a natural vitamin.)

  Finally, I ended up in the den. It had all of Hemlock House’s usual features—damask wallpaper and wainscoting, polished wooden floors, crystal sconces, a cavernous fireplace. It also had built-in bookshelves, the comfiest of chairs, and a secret passage. Over the last year and change, my temporary office had become not quite so temporary. My personal touches were the laptop, the tangle of charging cables, stacks of paper on every available surface, and a super cozy blanket.