First published in the USA by HarperCollins Publishers in 2018

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2018

Published in this ebook edition in 2018

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,

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Text copyright © Kimberly McCreight 2018

Typography by Sarah Nichole Kaufman

Cover images © Rubberball / Mike Kemp / Getty Images (burnt matchstick type); Shutterstock.com (all other images); Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Kimberly McCreight asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN: 9780008115104

Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780008115111

Version: 2018-06-19

For all of us,

May we rage on against the dying of the light.

#resist

EPIGRAPH

To the wrongs that need resistance,

To the right that needs assistance,

To the future in the distance,

Give yourselves.

—Carrie Chapman Catt (1859–1947),

President, National American Woman Suffrage Association

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Author’s Note

Wylie

Riel

Wylie

Jasper

Wylie

Riel

Wylie

Jasper

Riel

Jasper

Wylie

Riel

Jasper

Wylie

Riel

Wylie

Jasper

Riel

Wylie

Jasper

Wylie

Riel

Wylie

Jasper

Wylie

Riel

Wylie

Wylie

The Outliers

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Books by Kimberly McCreight

Discover Where It All Began . . .

About the Publisher

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. The things that you read here did not happen. At least, not yet.

Dear Rachel,

Don’t think that I’m not grateful for all you’ve done. It’s probably not possible to be more grateful to another human being. You saved my life. And, up until now, you’ve been right about me staying hidden. You’ve been right about everything.

I know you think going to see Wylie at the detention center is a bad idea. When we talked, you did an outstanding job explaining all the really logical, completely rational reasons why it would be dangerous. For her, and for me.

• It’s a prison filled with cameras: no more playing dead.

• Ben is already missing. Do I really want to leave my kids orphans?

• I could be putting Wylie even more in harm’s way. They could try to use me against her.

See, I was listening, Rachel. And I do trust you.

But I’ve got to trust my own instincts, too. And for all the risk there is in showing up at that detention center, there’s more in staying away. Maybe not a risk of physical harm to me or Wylie. But there are other kinds of pain, Rach. There’s other damage that matters.

I was the one person Wylie always counted on. And I lied in the worst possible way. How am I ever going to get her to trust me again? I’m terrified that I may have already lost her forever. So scared that sometimes I think my heart might stop. If I don’t start clawing my way back to her right now, I don’t think she’ll ever forgive me.

And I’ve already made a difference out here. Those people you suggested I contact, that senator, that friend of yours at the ACLU—they’ve had such good ideas about what this fight is going to entail. We have to be prepared, there’s no doubt about that.

But right now, I need to be Wylie’s mom first. That matters most of all. And she needs to know for sure that I’m alive. For that, she’ll need to see me with her own eyes. After what she’s been through, it’s the only option. I can’t hurt her for one second more. I won’t.

Okay, rant complete. I just wanted to state my case, for the record. And just so we’re 100% clear: going to see Wylie is something I’m going to do, with or without your help. Whatever happens, though, know how grateful I am. I’m so glad to have you back, too. I missed you more than you know.

Xx

Hope

WYLIE

I STAND IN FRONT OF THE GRAY DETENTION FACILITY DOOR, WAITING FOR IT TO buzz open. In my hand is a plastic grocery bag stuffed with the mildewed Cape Cod T-shirt and shorts I was wearing when I was arrested.

For the past two weeks, I’ve been in the standard-issue pajama-like shirt and pants twenty-four hours a day. So stiff, it’s like they were designed so you’d never sleep again. My current outfit is the total opposite. Expensive pair of denim shorts, threadbare in just the right places, and an absurdly soft plain gray T-shirt. Without me having to ask, Rachel brought the clothes in for me to wear home. And I’m grateful for that. I’ve felt grateful to Rachel for a lot of things.

Like starting with getting me out on bail. It wasn’t that complicated, Rachel says. Still, they went to so much trouble to get me in there, I didn’t think they’d let me go just because Rachel filed a petition for bail review. But I was wrong. Rachel came through for me, once again. According to her, it wasn’t just about the papers she filed, though. It was who you called after you filed them, which sounded both totally true and completely shady.

And I do credit Rachel alone, not my mom. I’m going to get you out of here. I promise. Xoxo. That’s what my mom’s note said. And on the other side: Trust Rachel. She will help you. She saved my life.

But those were just words. It’s easy to make promises and then disappear. It’s sticking around to face what you’ve done that’s the hard part.

RACHEL LOOKED SHEEPISH when she came to visit the morning after my mom had appeared like a ghost, pushing that creaky detention facility library cart. She felt guilty, too, I could read that loud and clear. We were in one of the small private rooms reserved for meetings with attorneys. The rooms that always smelled like onions and were freezing cold. The ones that Rachel cautioned weren’t actually that private at all.

It was Rachel’s guilt that erased all doubt. Not only had Rachel known my mom had come to see me in the detention facility, she had known the whole time that my mom was alive.

There was also no excuse for the fact that I’d missed Rachel’s deception. But she was usually really hard to read; the guilt today was kind of an exception. Maybe it was so many years of saying whatever it took for her clients. The only real constant was that Rachel always told less than the whole truth. Like it was a reflex. Trying to get a fix on her true feelings was like trying to grab a bolt of lightning in your hands. It probably made her an awesome lawyer. It did not make her an easy person to trust. In my defense, I never fully had. I had just come to accept that I did not.

As I sat down across from Rachel, I wanted so badly for her to be an Outlier, so she could feel the full force of my rage. Rachel had lied to me repeatedly.

Had I felt joyful when I’d looked up and seen my mom—my actual mom, risen from the grave—staring down at me with all that love in her eyes? Sure, I guess. Okay, yes, definitely. But a day later, it was mixed up in a stew of other feelings: anger, sadness, confusion, betrayal.

But my mom wasn’t there for me to take that out on her. Rachel was. And so, laying into her would have to do.

“First, I need to remind you, be careful what you discuss in here.” Rachel motioned overhead before I could say a word, to the invisible prying eyes in our smelly “private” attorney room. “But I’m sure you’re confused.”

“Confused?” I snapped. “How about seriously pissed off?”

She nodded, relieved. Glad not to be keeping my mom’s secret anymore, maybe. “That’s fair, too.”

“Explain,” I shot back, leaning closer. I pressed a finger into the tabletop. “Right now.”

Rachel looked away. “It was a real risk for her to come here, dangerous, you know. But she did it anyway because she wanted to be sure you believed. She knows how much you’ve been through, and she didn’t want you to think I was making it up, or jerking you around or whatever.” Worry. For a moment from Rachel. Just a flash. But not a trace of regret. “We are lucky I know the volunteer supervisor here. She did me a solid, letting your special visitor volunteer.”

“Right,” I said, my anger seeping away despite my grip, like water through cupped fingers. “So. Lucky.”

“Listen, if it makes a difference, she didn’t know it was going to turn out this way,” Rachel said. And this much was true, I was pretty sure. “Your—” She stopped herself, eyes darting around. “She turned up out of nowhere at my house the night of the accident. I hadn’t talked to her in what, ten years? But she thought someone was following her, and she ended up driving near my house. She was lucky I even lived there after all this time. To be honest, at first I thought she was drunk or having an episode or something. She sounded so paranoid, delusional almost. But she was just so freaked out. How could I risk not helping? I don’t know, maybe part of it was selfish, too. We didn’t end on the best terms, your mom and I. Maybe I thought this was a chance to prove that she was wrong about me.”

“Wrong about what?” The question felt weirdly important.

“You know your— She’s an avenging angel. And I gave up on noble a long time ago.” Rachel shrugged. Another cold, hard truth. Rachel might not have been ashamed, but she wasn’t proud of it, either. “Anyway, I didn’t think it would be a big deal to ask somebody to drive her car out of there. The girl in the car was the girlfriend of a client of mine. I’d hired her to clean my house, run errands. I knew she needed cash. She’d been sober for two months, trying to get her life straight. So, she needed money, and we needed someone to drive the car away. I thought it would be a win-win.”

“Not so much for that girl doing the driving,” I said, deciding not to mention the vodka bottle. Maybe the girl wasn’t so sober after all, but it felt like just another wrong to expose her now.

“Yeah, not so much,” Rachel said. She knew she should feel guilty but wasn’t all the way there.

“And after the crash, her disappearing and pretending to be dead was, like, the only logical option?” I sounded pissed, but sadness was closing in fast. “Going to the police or something normal like that was totally out of the question?”

“You know better than anybody that trusting the police isn’t always a simple proposition, Wylie. Besides, she was too worried about you guys,” Rachel said. “Something about baby dolls? She thought they were meant as a threat to you guys, specifically—her babies.”

“They weren’t even for her,” I said, though my mom wouldn’t have known that at the time. “We kept getting them after she was gone. I got one in the hospital. Anyway, she pretended like the dolls were nothing to worry about.”

“What was she supposed to say? Everybody freak the hell out? Anyway, there were other things, too, apparently,” she said. “Emails. Anonymous ones. They mentioned you guys specifically. Warned against the police. After the accident, we were both convinced the only way she could keep you safe was to let the people who were after her think she was dead.”

“Great plan,” I said, sounding extra snide.

“Well, it’s easy to see now that everything had to do with your dad’s research. But it wasn’t until your dad told her what happened with that assistant of his up at the camp in Maine—”

“Wait, what?” My chest clamped tight. “My dad knew she was alive?” Because that conversation could have only taken place in May, long after we believed she was dead.

“Not until after the camp.” Rachel avoided eye contact. “Once your . . . once she realized that her accident—that the threats—were really about his work, she had to let him know she was alive. Your dad wasn’t happy. But he understood, eventually. They decided together it was safer not to tell you and Gideon. That she had a better chance of helping behind the scenes if no one knew she was alive.” Rachel leaned forward eagerly, but it felt forced. “And she’s been all over the country, Wylie, working behind the scenes, meeting people, enlisting help from scientists, journalists, politicians. She’s been assembling a team to help. Everything has been to protect you.”

“Protect me?” I swallowed over the lump in my throat, motioned to the walls of the detention facility. “How is this safe?”

“You’re alive, Wylie,” Rachel said. “Aren’t you?”

“YO, HELLO?” THE tall guard with the long hair shouts at me. I’m still standing at the exit door. Sounds like she’s been buzzing it open for a while. “You want to stay in here? Go on, go ahead!”

No, I definitely do not want to stay locked up. I startle forward, gripping my crinkly plastic bag tighter. Besides the mildewed clothes, inside are an envelope with what’s left of Rachel’s money (a dried and wrinkled eighty dollars) and my mother’s wedding ring. Part of me wants to dig the ring out and hold it tight. Part of me wants to toss it down the nearest storm drain. My mom taking her engraved ring off and leaving it behind had been Rachel’s idea. Overkill, Rachel acknowledged now. But she had helped people disappear before. Better safe than sorry.

Finally, I step out into the July morning sun, hot already even at seven a.m., the weirdly early release time. I hold up a hand to shield my eyes from the glare as I scan the parking lot. The air is heavy and damp, weighing down my lungs. My anxiety has been relentless since I was arrested. Like a concrete slab strapped to my chest, slowly crushing me. Dr. Shepard said this was to be expected—the stress of the detention facility, the claustrophobia.

Except now that I’m outside, it doesn’t seem much better. I need to get going and stay moving. For me, forward momentum always helps; it’s the only good thing I learned from the horror of the camp in Maine.

It isn’t until I start walking that I finally spot him, leaning against the front of the car at the far edge of the parking lot. Like he didn’t want to fully commit to being there. He pushes himself up and waves, smiles way too hard.

Gideon.

Even from this distance, I can feel his guilt. The longer our dad is missing, the more Gideon blames himself. These days, guilt is what Gideon has become.

I’ve told him that he’s holding himself responsible for way too much. The list of Outliers that Gideon gave to Dr. Cornelia might have been a shortcut to a bigger group of Outliers to round up, but I was the one who encouraged our dad to go to DC, where he was grabbed by God knows who. Somebody working for Quentin, I still assume. Though Quentin had seemed genuinely shocked when I told him about my dad the day he’d shown up in his baseball cap at the detention facility. But who else? Senator Russo? Sure, my dad was supposed to meet with him, but Rachel forced the DC police to check him out every which way. There’s no record they ever had a meeting scheduled, and there is a mile-deep paper trail proving Russo was in Arizona at the time.

And I may still be convinced Russo has done something really bad, but even I don’t think that thing was taking my dad. No one was ever able to find the woman who supposedly had my dad’s phone, either. And it’s dead now, or destroyed. Regardless, they can’t track it down. Leaving the single, solitary clue about what happened to him a security video unearthed of him leaving the airport with someone, then getting into a black sedan. I haven’t seen the video, but Rachel has. She says that my dad looks to be walking “normally” in the video, as in voluntarily. But then, he’d been expecting someone from Russo’s office to come pick him up. It’s not surprising that he would have gone with whoever it was.

The man—we assume a man—is only visible from the back. Shortish, with his hood up. That’s all Rachel can say. Basically, he could be anyone. Quentin, even. In my mind, all roads still lead back to him.

I promised Rachel that I’d tell Gideon about our mom. But now that he’s here on the other side of the parking lot, I wish I had refused. Because I know just how bad it feels to find out she lied. I’ve been mad at Gideon a lot lately, but I would never wish that pain on him. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

Gideon takes a couple steps toward me and waves again. As I start across the parking lot to him, a white van whooshes past in front of me. So close that it sends me rocking back on my heels. I watch as the van pulls to a hard stop at the detention facility gates. A second later, they swing open and it speeds inside. That guard was right, what am I waiting for? Terrible things happen in wasted time.

“Hey,” Gideon says when I finally reach him. He motions to my bag. “You need help?”

It’s sweet. But sweet Gideon makes the world feel unsteady and upside down.

Even not-sweet Gideon isn’t my first choice right now. I would have preferred Jasper. Then I could have finally wrapped my arms around him like I’ve been wanting to every day for the past two weeks. But getting out happened so fast. They told me only yesterday after Jasper had left the visitors’ room that my bail had been posted. And when I tried Jasper’s cell today, I got a the customer you are trying to reach is not available message. I’ve tried not to worry. Jasper probably forgot to pay the bill, I tell myself. But each time I believe it a little less.

“I’m good,” I say to Gideon as I head around to the far side of our father’s car. “But thanks,” I add, hoping it will make him stop looking at me like I am the only thing that can keep him from drowning.

“Where to?” Gideon asks once we’re in the car, trying to sound cheerful, casual. “Want to grab breakfast or something? The food must be terrible in there.”

“Um, maybe later,” I say. I should tell Gideon about our mom right now. Get it over with. Instead, I just look away out the window. “Let’s get going. As far from here as possible.”

I just can’t tell him. Not yet.

GIDEON JUST GOT his license. Turns out, he’s a terrible driver. Nervous and slow, but then suddenly fast. Not that I should judge. Gideon has gotten himself behind the wheel, which is more than I can say. But when he finally lurches out of the detention facility parking lot, I’m thrown back against the seat, nauseous already.

“Sorry,” he says, pumping hard on the brakes. “I’m still getting the hang of it.”

I nod and turn again toward the window, watching the worn-out strip malls and boarded-up fast-food restaurants pass. The area around the detention facility is an ugly, desperate place. I should feel better leaving it behind. But instead, my dread is on the rise. Like I already know that what lies ahead is worse than what lies behind. Because this feeling isn’t just anxiety. On a good day, I’ve learned to tell the difference.

Gideon and I drive on for another twenty minutes, exchanging harmless chitchat between long pockets of silence. How was your cellmate? Very nice. What’s the food like? Very bad. Did anyone try to beat you up? No. Every time I open my mouth and don’t tell him our mom is alive, I feel even more like a liar.

I’m relieved when we’re finally pulling into downtown Newton. It looks exactly as it did when I left but feels weirdly unfamiliar. It isn’t until we’ve made the next right that I realize we’ve turned down Cassie’s street. And, up ahead, there it is: Cassie’s house, with its gingerbread peaked roof and ivy-covered facade, picture-perfect as ever. I feel the moment Gideon realizes his mistake. He may not be an Outlier, but he’s not an idiot.

“Oh, um, I— Crap.” He slams on the brakes so hard, I brace myself against the dashboard to avoid bashing my face. “Sorry, I wasn’t thinking. I can just turn around if you—”

“No.” And even I’m surprised by how forcefully it comes out. I don’t really know why. “I haven’t, um, been here since her funeral. I don’t know . . . I kind of want to see her house.”

Want is the wrong word. Need would be more accurate. Like obsessively must. It feels as though some kind of essential truth is buried in the past—Cassie’s past, our past. Like we will only break free of this terrible loop of heartbreak and loss after we force ourselves back to the start.

“Pull over there, just for a minute?” I point toward a nearby curb.

“Seriously?” Gideon asks, gripping the steering wheel even tighter, hunched over it now like an old man. He feels way out of his depth with the driving, not to mention managing me. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure,” I lie. Luckily, Gideon has no way of knowing that. “Please, just for a minute.”

Finally, Gideon lurches to a stop at the side of the road. The house looks exactly the same. It’s only been two months since Cassie’s funeral; still I expected more decomposition. Maybe this is why I needed to stop here: to be reminded that the world rages on no matter how many of us are cut down by its wake.

No, it’s not that. That sounds good, but that’s not why I’m here. It’s something else. Something more specific. Cassie’s house. Cassie’s house. Why?

Cassie’s journal, maybe? It could be. Jasper and I never did figure out who mailed him those pages.

“WHO CARES WHO sent them?” Jasper asked.

We were sitting across the table from each other in the detention facility visiting room. Day thirteen of my incarceration, day thirteen of Jasper faithfully coming to see me. He sat, as he always did, with his hands tucked under his legs against the hard plastic chair. So he’d remember not to try to hold my hand. He’d forgotten once and had almost been permanently banned. No touching. No exchanging of objects. Shirt and shoes required. There weren’t many rules. But they were enforced like nobody’s business.

“I care who sent them,” I said. “It makes me nervous not to know. It should make you nervous, too.”

“Nervous?” Jasper asked. I looked for an edge in his voice. Everything always makes you nervous. But he didn’t mean it that way. Jasper wasn’t about subtext. It was one of the things I loved about him.

Yeah, loved. I hadn’t said it to him yet. It was more like an idea I was trying on for size. But so far it fit. Much better than I would have thought. And I kept waiting for that to make me feel stupid, like I’d been tricked into something. But instead it felt like I’d trusted my way there.

“We should at least investigate,” I said.

“It was Maia. We already decided that.”

“You decided,” I said. “I want confirmation.”

“Wait, you’re not jealous, are you?” Jasper teased. I shot him a look, and he held up his hands. “Sorry, bad joke.”

And then he blushed, like actual red cheeks, which was kind of old-fashioned. But then our whole two-week-long detention facility courtship had been all chaste conversation and hands to ourselves, in twenty-six-minute, guard-supervised increments. The truth was—despite what we’d been through—Jasper and I didn’t know each other that well. But as we unfolded slowly in front of each other, we slid more tightly into place.

Turned out, Jasper was goofy. Much more so than I realized. And so brutally, heartbreakingly sensitive underneath. He talked about his dad a lot, what it meant to be afraid you were going to become something you hated. He used that fear to explain how he kind of understood my anxiety. In a way, sort of. And I didn’t get the connection. But I loved Jasper for trying to make one.

“I’m going to need to hear Maia say it was her who sent the journal pages before I’ll believe it,” I said. “Otherwise, it’s going to nag at me.”

Jasper’s face softened. “You want me to go ask Maia?” It was a token offer.

I nodded anyway. “Yes, please.”

Jasper took a breath and closed his eyes. “Okay,” he said, drawing out the word. “But only because I . . .” The color rushed back into his cheeks. He waited a beat before looking up at me. “For you, I will. But only for you.”

BUT SITTING HERE now, staring up at Cassie’s house, it occurs to me that it’s stupid to bother asking Maia. She’ll just deny it. And so maybe that’s why I wanted to stop here, to ask Cassie’s mom, Karen. She can tell us whether Maia has ever been in Cassie’s room alone with the diary. She might even know something more.

“I need to ask Karen one quick thing,” I say, unbuckling my seat belt and opening the door. “I’ll be right back.”

“Seriously?” Gideon asks, but I’m already halfway out the door. “Ugh, then I’m coming with you.”

It isn’t until I’m on the front walk that I notice the weeds poking up between the stones. The house is disintegrating more than I realized. Karen probably is, too.

“Can I help you?” a woman calls from the neighboring yard before we’re even at the door. Her voice is sharp, unwelcoming.

When I turn, there’s Mrs. Dominic, Cassie’s grumpy, gray-haired neighbor, wearing a lime-green sweat suit, a grocery bag gripped against her right side, even though it seems awfully early to be getting back from shopping. Cassie never liked Mrs. Dominic. And I am pretty sure I’m about to find out why.

“We’re here for Karen,” Gideon says when I stay silent.

Mrs. Dominic peers closer, looks us up and down. We are up to no good. It’s been decided. She takes two steps closer so that she’s almost on Cassie’s lawn. But not quite.

“Why?” she asks.

My stomach churns icily—my own anxiety this time. But it’s followed then by that now-familiar prickly, Outlier heat. That’s all about Mrs. Dominic. She’s too aggravated by us, too interested. All wrong. I don’t want to tell her anything. And really, what business are we of hers?

I force a smile. “Thank you,” I say firmly. “But we’re fine.”

As though she had offered her help, not her suspicion.

“Well, Karen’s not in there anyway. No one is,” Mrs. Dominic says, happy to disappoint us. “She went away.”

“Went away where?” I ask, feeling far too devastated, I know.

Mrs. Dominic rocks back on her heels. “I’m afraid I can’t say.” Can’t clearly means won’t. “After what that poor woman went through, it’s no surprise she couldn’t stay here. Why don’t you give me your information? I’ll pass it on when she gets back.”

This is an excuse to get our names. She has no intention of passing on anything. To her credit, she is pretty convincing. Or she would be for someone who isn’t me.

“That’s okay.” I tug Gideon by the arm. “We were just going.”

EndOfDays Blog

November 5

It is critical that we all stand ready when called upon to do what is right . Whatever it might cost each of us personally. Love of the Lord requires sacrifice. That is how we show that we are loyal servants to a higher power.

If we expect to see the benefits of being devout in our own lives, we must be willing to sacrifice so that we can show we are deserving of all that has been sacrificed for us. And one thing we cannot allow is a world intent on racing to the next scientific discovery at the cost of innocent lives.

We must be willing to stand up to such forces. We must be willing to fight righteously for the innocent and the weak. Whatever the cost.

Go in peace, everyone. To the light.

RIEL

RIEL LIES IN LEO’S NARROW BED. EYES WIDE OPEN IN THE DARK. WITH INSOMNIAC Leo’s super-shades down, it’s pitch-black in his room, even though it’s nearly eight a.m. As Leo breathes heavily in his sleep, Riel tries to imagine a night sky above filled with stars. Purple-blue blackness and pinpricks of light. Like glitter. Her sister, Kelsey, loved to do shit like that. To look up at the stars. Pretend they were there, even when they weren’t. But all Riel sees is blackness. That’s all she’s ever seen.

Riel shifts in bed, curls up closer to Leo. Hopes his steady breathing will put her back to sleep. It won’t, though. It never does.

Once, after their parents died, Kelsey slept outside in the freezing cold just so she could feel “close to them.” To the stars? To their parents? Riel didn’t ask. Kelsey’s explanations always made things worse.

Kelsey was an old soul, though, a sensitive spirit. An artist, born short a layer of skin. Not just because she was an Outlier, either. Riel’s an Outlier, but she’s always been hard as nails. She’d survive a goddamn nuclear winter, even when she was trying to die.

Riel had been eighteen and a freshman at Harvard, Kelsey only sixteen, when their parents died last November. Swept away in a flash flood while building temporary housing in Arkansas. Because that was the kind of people they were. Good people. People who died doing the right thing.

Doing good was what Riel had intended with Level99. And maybe that even was what she was doing before Quentin came along in April, only weeks after Kelsey died. Riel was still shredded by her grief, and Quentin made it sound like Kelsey could still be alive if it wasn’t for one ambitious asshole: Dr. Ben Lang. Dr. Lang cared only about his new discovery—these Outliers—making him rich. And so, Riel had decided the only thing that mattered was making him pay. She could tell Quentin was an ass from the start, of course. An untrustworthy narcissist. But that had mattered less than seeing to it that Dr. Lang got what was coming to him.

Deep down, she’d also probably known that Kelsey had been doomed from the start, regardless of Dr. Ben Lang. That finding out she was an Outlier wouldn’t have changed a damn thing. Maybe being an Outlier didn’t make things easier, but it wasn’t her whole problem either. Kelsey had started drinking way before their parents died. Riel had heard them talking about getting Kelsey help. But then they were dead. The drugs didn’t start until after their funeral. Pot, then pills. Kelsey flew downhill like she was on a damn toboggan.

Riel had reached out to grab her, but she was already gone.

“WAIT, WHO ARE you going with?” Riel asked that last night, as Kelsey raced around her still girlish bedroom—pink walls, boy band posters—getting dressed. It was March, six months since their parents’ deaths. For the first time, Kelsey seemed happy, and not because she was high out of her mind.

“My friend,” Kelsey said, fussing with her amazing head of dark curls. She was beautiful, but in a soft, graceful way. Riel was beautiful, too, but not that way.

“What friend?”

“You know, the one I met at the museum. Grace-Ann.”

“Grace-Ann. Right. Are you sure that’s even her name?”

“Why wouldn’t that be her name?” Kelsey asked with a laugh.

“I don’t know. It sounds made up. Like from Little House on the Prairie or something. Anyway, this Grace-Ann’s party is out in the middle of nowhere?” Riel had a bad feeling about this party. A really bad one. She’d had a bad feeling about this Grace-Ann girl, too, from the first time Kelsey mentioned her. “You live ten minutes from the middle of Boston. Go out there.”

“It’s her party and that’s where she lives. In a group home, by the way. Because she lost her parents, too. They took off, they didn’t die, but same idea.” Kelsey stopped fussing and turned to Riel. Sadness welled up in her, Riel could feel it. “She and I have that in common, and it makes me feel better. Okay? Besides, it sounds fun. The party’s in some old research place. Nothing illegal. Just fun. Nothing sounds fun anymore.”

Grace-Ann was the same girl Kelsey had spent much of the winter with, trolling the nearby university campuses, looking for boys. One time, they’d ended up stumbling into some psych test and using the twenty-buck stipend to buy beer. Riel was glad it hadn’t been Harvard. There was no chance she knew the boys they’d shared those beers with. Still, so many risks. Too many.

“No,” Riel said. “You’re not going.”

“No?” Kelsey laughed.

“No,” Riel repeated, crossing her arms. “I have a bad feeling. You can’t go.”

Kelsey just laughed harder. “Listen, I love you, Rie-Rie,” she said. “But seriously, what are you going to do to stop me?” She came over to hug Riel. “Don’t worry, I’ll be careful. I promise.”

Because that was the truth: Riel was in charge without being in charge. All she could do was stand there at the edge of the road, silently screaming Watch out! as her sister hurtled headlong into oncoming traffic.

THE NEXT MORNING, Kelsey’s bed was empty and unslept in. It wasn’t until Riel had searched the entire house and thought over and over, I could have stopped her, I should have stopped her, I could have stopped her, that she finally looked out the window. And spotted something. On the driveway.

Riel raced out the front door. Heart thumping. Body shaking. Already dialing 911 on the cell phone gripped in her hand. But when she finally reached Kelsey splayed out there, she could see it was far too late for help. Her sister was stiff and blue. Hours dead. Dumped, by Grace-Ann, no doubt, some girl without parents or a face and maybe a made-up name. Some girl Riel couldn’t find to blame.

And so, in the end, Dr. Ben Lang had to do.

ACCORDING TO WYLIE, somebody had written about that psych test in her and Kelsey’s copy of 1984. But that someone hadn’t been Kelsey. She’d had no way of knowing at the time that that test she’d taken had anything to do with the Outliers. It had just been about the boys and the twenty bucks and the beer and that terrible bullshit friend. It must have been that “fake Kelsey” Wylie had met.

Leo stirs finally. Without realizing it, Riel has been squeezing him too hard.

“Close your eyes,” he whispers. Though she is behind him, he knows. “Try to go back to sleep.”

Leo doesn’t ask what’s wrong. He never does. He doesn’t ask questions. Doesn’t expect answers. It’s why Riel stays. That, and because she loves Leo. Someday, she might even tell him. But then, she has an unfair advantage. She can already feel Leo loves her.

She stares at Leo’s back. “I’ve already been up for too long.”

“I could make you tea.”

Her dad would have liked Leo and his random cups of tea. Her mom would have approved of his loyalty. I can’t stop thinking about Kelsey. That’s the truth, but Riel doesn’t say that. If she does, she might cry. And once she starts, she’ll never fucking stop. As it is, her grip is slipping.

“There are people following me,” Riel says finally. This isn’t what she was thinking about. But maybe it should be. It’s definitely a good distraction from Kelsey.

“What?” Leo asks, sounding more alarmed than she was prepared for. He pushes himself up in bed and turns to look at her. Riel wishes she hadn’t said anything. “Who’s following you?”

“I don’t know.”

Though she has her suspicions. The agents who had showed up at her grandfather’s house, namely.

“IT’S IMPERATIVE THAT we find Wylie Lang,” Agent Klute declared once Riel had finally returned to the front door of her grandfather’s Cape house. By then, Wylie and Jasper had stroked safely into the darkness.

Klute was super pissed, too. Riel could feel how bad he wanted to slap the smug look off her face. And so she invited him in real sweetly. Just to get under his skin.

“Oh, do come in and look for her yourself,” she said, waving a gracious hand. “She’s not here. And I’ve got nothing to hide.”

Klute didn’t move, though—nothing like someone getting what they want to throw them off.

“Um,” Riel said. “Are you coming in or not?”

“Yeah, we’re coming in,” Klute said finally, waving her to the side and stepping in the door.

“Like I said, Wylie’s not here,” Riel said when Klute and his partner had finally pounded around the upstairs and downstairs. “Her dad, Dr. Lang, went missing in DC. She probably went there to look for him. Maybe she’ll even run into Granddad while she’s there?”

Agent Klute didn’t look Riel’s way, but she felt the split-second tremor when she mentioned Dr. Lang. It was unmistakable. There was a connection between Dr. Lang and her grandfather, no doubt. They might have followed Jasper’s phone, but that wasn’t the only reason these agents were at her grandfather’s house. Not by a long shot.

Hours later, after the agents had thoroughly searched the house and the grounds, once and then again, and they’d asked every possible question in at least three different ways, they finally let Riel and Leo go. Or to be more precise, they kicked them out of Riel’s grandfather’s house.

Agent Klute got into Riel’s face on her way out. “And stay away from Wylie Lang,” he growled. “Stay away from this entire situation.”

“What situation?” Riel asked snidely. Violence. A wave of it from Agent Klute. So strong, it almost took Riel’s breath away. “Maybe if you explain—”

Klute grabbed her arm then and jerked her close, the pain so sharp and unexpected it almost made Riel cry out.

“Stay away. From all of it. Especially Wylie Lang,” Agent Klute repeated through clenched teeth. He pointed at Leo then. “If you don’t, he’ll be the one who pays. I’ll personally make sure of it.”

“WHERE ARE THEY following you?” Leo asks. “What do you mean?”

Riel didn’t mean to freak Leo out. She feels bad now for telling him. “I mean, not all over. There’s not like an army of them or something. But every once in a while when I’m out, I’ll spot someone watching me. Maybe. I haven’t seen that asshole Klute again, luckily. But I think I have seen that white van they were in at my grandfather’s house.”

“But Wylie’s in jail, and you haven’t spoken to her,” Leo says. “How much farther do they want you to stay away?”

Riel shrugs. “Wylie isn’t the whole thing, you know?”

“But you have been staying away from the rest, too, right?” Leo asks.

“I haven’t even been to Level99 since my grandfather’s house. You know that,” Riel says. “I barely leave your room.”

“Good.” Leo lies back down. Exhales like he’s relieved. He isn’t. “They’ll lose interest eventually, right?”

“I hope so,” Riel says. “Because it kind of feels like I’m running out of places to hide.”

WHEN RIEL WAKES again, it’s nine a.m. The shades are up and Leo’s small dorm room is filled with light, the small slice of bed next to her empty. Riel runs a hand over the cool, crumpled sheets. Leo has Harvard summer program classes and an internship. That’s the only reason he even has a dorm room right now. A tiny single—desk, bed, that’s it. Long-term visitors, much less roommates, are against the rules. But Leo insisted that Riel stay. Hard to argue when she had no place else to go.

Before, Riel had been sleeping at the Level99 house, ever since Kelsey died in March. But it’s not safe for Level99 if she’s there now. She doesn’t want Agent Klute coming after her and finding them. And also, maybe she just wants a break. From everything. Leo’s felt like such a safe place to hide.

Riel picks up her new burner off the nightstand. She’s been changing them out weekly. The only people who have the number are Leo and Level99. The phone has one text. Maybe even one that just woke her. A ?, and nothing more. It’s from Brian. It means, You coming in? Brian checks in every day. He doesn’t actually want Riel to come in, of course. He likes being in charge of Level99. He just likes to confirm that he still is.

Riel reminds Brian all the time that she is coming back when things cool down. That him being in charge is temporary, and only to protect Level99—even if it is more complicated than that for Riel right now. Maybe Brian even knows she’s conflicted. Someone has been jumping in and out of Riel’s online life. She’s noticed. Brian, checking up on her for sure. And fair enough. That’s his job now. To protect Level99.

But then what’s Riel’s job? To protect herself? Wylie? The Outliers? She’s not sure anymore, and it makes her feel more lost than she wants to admit.

“My dad is with your grandfather.” That was what Wylie said that night right before she dove into the water. And then there was that guilty twitch from Agent Klute when Riel had pursued the lead. Her grandfather. He’s an asshole, no doubt. But connected to the Outliers and Dr. Ben Lang? How and why? It doesn’t make any sense.

And, if so, how the fuck hadn’t she seen him coming? What kind of an Outlier was she?

That’s the problem, isn’t it? Reading’s not ESP. It’s not a crystal ball. Feelings and instincts are fuzzy things. They change. Shift. Blur. And people will want Outliers to prove they can read minds. Or they won’t believe they can do anything. It will be all or nothing. Neither here nor there is the place you get crushed in between.

Senator David Russo was Kelsey and Riel’s maternal grandfather, and he’d always hated their dad. According to their grandfather, their dad and his Communist, a.k.a. liberal, ideals had ruined their mother. Making Riel and Kelsey the fruit of his poisonous tree. Their dad was also black, which Riel has always suspected was their grandfather’s bigger issue with him, and them.

When their parents died, it was decided that the girls were old enough to take care of themselves. This was true in theory, if not in fact. Riel was three months in at Harvard, studying computer science. The plan was that she would move home and commute to school until Kelsey graduated high school. No problem. They had plenty of money through their mother’s trust, too. No problem. Their mother’s sister—childless Aunt Susan, a banker from Manhattan—would check in on them occasionally. No problem. They were good kids anyway, responsible.

Of course, just because they could take care of themselves didn’t mean that they should.

They hadn’t seen their grandfather in years when he came to their parents’ funeral—the cameras were watching, after all. And he didn’t speak to either one of them at the funeral. He spoke at them: a few polite words tossed in their direction like stale candy from a parade float.

It was only after the funeral that Riel had tracked down her grandfather’s Cape house and started breaking in on occasion, to mess with him. It wasn’t something she was proud of, but it was satisfying.

Riel is about to answer Brian’s text—nope, not coming in—when she sees an envelope slide under Leo’s door. Nope. That’s what Riel thinks about that, too. Don’t want that. But these days ignoring a note under a door is not an option.

Riel pushes herself up out of bed and heads over to pick it up. She lifts it carefully. Inside the envelope is a single sheet of paper, on it a single handwritten sentence: They know you have them.

Goddamn it. Fucking enough. Riel jerks open Leo’s door and looks up and down the hallway, trembling with rage. She’s ready to scream at Klute or whoever left it. But there’s no one in sight.

Riel closes the door, heart beating hard as she studies the paper again. The words are still there, unfortunately. Riel was right, there was somebody following her—her grandfather, his people, Klute. They’ve known all along exactly where she is. Leo’s room, that small square of safety: gone. Like so much else.

They know you have them? Have what? It takes Riel a beat. Wylie’s pictures? The eight-and-a-half-by-eleven envelope she shoved at Riel before racing out of her grandfather’s house.

Riel has only ever taken a quick look just so she knew what she had: pictures of buildings—shitty, blurry pictures. Obviously, they were important to Wylie, but just looking at them it wasn’t obvious why. Once, Riel had seen Leo late at night flipping through them in the darkness. He’d told her the next day she should get rid of them. Not because of what was in them. But because they were Wylie’s. And he’d been right. Of course he had been.

BREW IS THREE blocks from Leo’s dorm. It has long, knotty tables, perpetually packed with nerdy types hunched over laptops. These are Riel’s people, even if she doesn’t exactly look the part with her fashionable tank top, low-slung jeans, gameboard tattoo, and piercings. But Riel will always be a complete nerd at heart.

As usual in the morning, there is nowhere to sit at Brew. Riel has to hover for ten minutes before a table finally opens up. As she waits, she realizes she can’t be sure that it’s safer to be in Brew than Leo’s room. But at least in Brew, there will be witnesses to any abduction.

After Riel sits down, she pulls out the eight-and-a-half-by-eleven envelope of Wylie’s pictures from her bag, sees the name on the envelope: David Rosenfeld. She’d forgotten about that.

Riel looks around the café again before she opens the envelope, feels like she’s being watched. But she doesn’t see anyone looking at her. Then again, these people’s whole job is to blend in. Finally, Riel flips through the pictures quickly: a blurry office building, a shelf or rack with what look like big white buckets on it. The buckets have writing on them, but it’s impossible to make out. Like she remembered, nothing to go on in the pictures, except how badly shot they are. That and the fact that her grandfather apparently really wants them. Probably her grandfather. Riel’s real evidence for this is super thin, but the feeling that she is right? Outlier, instinct, whatever you want to call it, it’s overwhelming.

David Rosenfeld. He’s the next logical step. Riel pulls her laptop out and jumps on the wide-open-to-tracking public Wi-Fi. It’s a risk, but there aren’t other options. A second later, she has a couple dozen possible Rosenfelds: a lawyer, a dentist, a high school baseball star. And then, there it is, the fourth entry down, a link to an author’s website: David Rosenfeld.

Riel clicks through to the site, which drops her onto a glossy home page with a bunch of New York Times bestselling books stacked up artfully. The headshot of the author—current reporter, former soldier—on the right-hand side. Rosenfeld. Curly hair, thick black-framed glasses. Cute, even if the picture is a little too much about his biceps. His books are all about Iraq and Afghanistan, except for the most recent, which is called A Private War: How Outsourcing Is Changing the Face of the Military. And there is a related article: “Want Funding, but No Oversight? How the Federal Government Gets Away with Looking at Everyone but Themselves.”

This is the right Rosenfeld, no doubt about that. Military financing smells like her grandfather. But what does he have to do with the pictures? It would be a hell of a lot easier just to swing by the detention facility and ask Wylie. But Klute warned Riel specifically to stay away from her. It’s bad enough that she’s ignoring the other part of what Klute said: stay away from all of it. Riel is pretty sure the pictures fall into the “all of it” category.

Riel startles when her phone vibrates in her pocket. She pulls it out to read the text. Be back in fifteen. Forgot something. L. Shit, Leo will be back way earlier than she expected. And she left out that note: They know you have them. She needs to beat Leo back home and get rid of it before he sees it. He will freak out otherwise.

Riel’s still looking down at her phone when there’s a voice right next to her. “Excuse me?”

She jumps to her feet, clutching the pictures against her body. “What the fuck?” she shouts.

But there’s just a skinny, acne-spotted guy who looks about twelve years old, blinking at her. He holds up his nervous hands and moves them around in the air.

“Oh, sorry, no, I’m—” He touches the back of the open chair across from Riel. “I just wanted to borrow this chair.”

“Yeah, yes,” Riel manages. “Take it.”

But as she sits back down, she notices somebody else on the opposite side of the room. Baseball hat and glasses. A take-out coffee in one hand, a braided leather bracelet on his wrist. Sitting at a table. Alone. He was watching her a second ago. She can feel the echo of his stare. Worse yet, Riel has seen him somewhere before. The baseball hat is doing the trick, though—she can’t place him.

But she doesn’t need to. Between that and Leo about to beat her back to the room, it’s time to go. Riel snaps shut her computer and shoves it and the pictures in her bag before heading quickly for the door.

The fresh air is a relief, but Riel still feels jittery out on the sidewalk. She crosses the street quickly and picks up speed, checking over her shoulder a few times. But there’s no one behind her. She’s at a jog by the time she enters the gates to campus.

On campus, she feels alone, singled out. Scared. Despite all the people—professors, graduate students, summer program students, tourists.

As Riel dives into the flow, someone blows past her, knocking hard into her elbow. Running in the direction of Leo’s dorm at the far end of the square. Riel is about to yell at the guy when she notices that he isn’t the only one who’s hustling that way. Lots of people are. They are all rushing in the direction of Leo’s dorm.

No is what Riel thinks as she starts to run, too. No. No. No.

She sees the fire trucks first, right there by Leo’s building. She blinks hard. But they remain. Lights flashing. And then, only a second later, she sees the flames. Actual freakin’ flames. Coming out the windows.

The windows to Leo’s dorm room.

TOP SECRET AND CONFIDENTIAL

To: Senator David Russo

From: The Architect

Re: Outlier Identification Modeling

April 3

To summarize today’s meeting, they will proceed to run predictive modeling for two potential programs to identify and track subjects demonstrating specified skill set. One model will examine the use of identification cards. The second model will study the possible use of observable bracelets.

Aspects evaluated will include:

—Likelihood of subgroup compliance with protocol

—Cost of protocol

—Ease of enforcement

—Time from initiation to launch

—Likelihood of legal opposition

—Efficacy of protocol in properly alerting nontarget subgroup

Results to follow.

WYLIE

THE MENU AT HOLY COW IS WRITTEN ON A MIRROR BEHIND THE OLD-FASHIONED soda counter in curly white script. It’s barely eleven a.m., so we’re the only customers, seated at a booth along the wall. We ended up there after we left Cassie’s and after we stopped at the drugstore and after we went for breakfast and after we drove around and around. I told Gideon I wanted to go to all those places because I could. Because I wanted to feel free. That’s true. It’s also true that I’m stalling. Like if we don’t go home, I don’t have to tell him about our mom. So now, ice cream at Holy Cow.

Nicholas is behind the counter; a gray-haired man with an impressive potbelly, a huge square face, and an intimidating scowl. Cassie always said he was much sweeter than he looked. He would have to be.

Telling Gideon about our mom would be so much easier if Jasper were here. Not for Gideon, maybe. Gideon still isn’t exactly a Jasper fan. But definitely for me. I still haven’t been able to reach Jasper, though. Using Gideon’s cell, I’ve tried his phone twice, and both times I’ve gotten a new recording: this number is no longer in service. A definite downgrade from the customer you are trying to reach is not available, which I got before. Calling Jasper’s mom is my best option now, I know that. But I need to work up my courage first.

“Hello?” When I look down, Gideon is holding out a menu to me.

“Oh, thanks.”

The bell on the door chimes as the girl Cassie used to work with and couldn’t stand comes in. She used to have bright pink acrylic nails and bows in her long blond hair, but she’s cut it pixie-short and dyed it bright white. She has a nose ring, too, and trimmed bare fingernails. I wonder if those things would have made Cassie like her more. Or less. I’m not sure I know anymore. After the funeral and before the hospital, Jasper had once joked about Cassie being a terrible judge of character. And somehow it felt not like an insult, but like an act of love. To remember her fondly, but exactly as she was.

“Are you okay?” Gideon asks.

To say anything now other than the whole truth would feel like an actual betrayal. Still, my mouth feels stuck. I lean forward and imagine punching the words from the base of my gut.

“Mom is . . . ,” I begin, but nothing more will come.

Gideon’s eyes snap up from his menu. “Mom is what?”

Afraid, that’s how he feels. Afraid of something exactly like what I am about to tell him. Something that will make everything even worse. And what I wish most at this moment is that I could have no idea how he feels.

“She’s alive,” I say, looking down at the table, bracing myself for the blowback: betrayal, anger, rage, hurt. “She’s been alive this whole time. It wasn’t her in the car.”

But nothing. I feel nothing from him. And when I look up, Gideon is just staring stone-faced at the wall. Totally numb. And it is awful. I’d much rather he’d feel something, anything—anger, rage, sadness. This quiet emptiness? It’s like peering into a sucking black hole.

“Gideon?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he says finally. But still, he feels nothing. And he looks so pale and stunned.

“Are you okay?”

“Sure,” he says, raising his hands helplessly. Am I? they ask.

And then suddenly, the floodgates open and Gideon’s heartbreak plows into me with such force that without thinking I reach forward and clutch his hands.

“I know, I’m sorry,” I say, looking away as tears fill his eyes. I haven’t seen Gideon cry since we were little kids. And I do not want to, especially not now. “Rachel says that Mom did it to protect us. Not the accident, that was . . . Someone really did try to run her off the road. It just wasn’t her in the car. But the staying away after, I mean. It’s been to keep us safe.”

“I should have known.” Gideon shakes his head.

“How could you have?” I say. “Who would ever have thought that—”

“There’s an envelope in your room.” He cuts me off sharply. “And if you want to know why I was in your room, looking through your stuff—I don’t have a good excuse. I went through everybody’s room in the past two weeks—Mom and Dad’s, yours. I was lonely.”

And this is so heartbreakingly true it makes my breath catch.

“What letter?” I ask.

“On your nightstand,” he says. “I didn’t open it, I swear. But I saw it there. And I thought, wow, that kind of looks like Mom’s handwriting. Of course, because I’m me and not you, I didn’t have a ‘feeling’ about anything. I was like, logic says Mom is dead. So it’s old or something . . .”

“I didn’t have a feeling either until she was standing right in front of me. I had no idea she was alive.” But that’s true only technically—I was obsessed about the accident not being an accident. Probably because some part of me knew she wasn’t dead.

“Wait.” Gideon’s eyes are wide. “You saw her? Where?”

Crap.

“Only for a second,” I say, wishing I could snatch the words back and stuff them down my throat. “She came to the detention facility just so I would know Rachel was telling me the truth.”

“Awesome,” he says. “Well, I guess we know for sure who’s the favorite child now. Not that there was any doubt before.”

“Gideon, come on, that’s not—”

“Don’t.” He looks at me hard. His hurt is already hardening around his heart. “Don’t protect her. Where the hell has she been then?”

And so I tell Gideon what I know about Mom and Rachel and what happened that last night. As I say it out loud, I realize just how little I do know.

“Where has all this rallying of the troops gotten her?” Gideon asks. “I seriously hope she has something to show for it.”

“I don’t know. We should ask Rachel. There is something else, though,” I say. And I need to get it all out, all at once. Now. “Dad knew.”

“What?” Gideon’s hurt has caught fire—it’s anger now. “Come on. Seriously?!”

Cassie’s ex-coworker has appeared at our table, recoiling from Gideon’s shouting. “You want me to come back?” she asks, giving Gideon the side-eye. Her name tag says Brittany.

“I just lost my appetite,” Gideon mutters.

“A black-and-white milk shake?” I don’t want anything, but we need to buy something so we can sit here a little longer.

Brittany narrows her eyes at me. “Hey, you’re Cassie’s friend, aren’t you?”

I nod and try to smile, but I’m not sure I actually do. “Yeah, I am. I was.”

“That sucked, what happened to her,” Brittany says.

And suddenly this feels like an opportunity. To give Gideon a chance to calm, yes, but maybe Brittany is even the reason I told Gideon I wanted to go to Holy Cow in the first place. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” Brittany says, though it feels like no. I can even feel her backing away, though her feet haven’t moved.

“Were you here when she met the guy she was dating?” I’m hoping she saw something or heard something about Quentin that might help me find out who he is. Or, better yet, where he is.

“You mean Jasper?” Brittany asks. “I saw him at a party once. Cute, you know, in a jock kind of way. But Cassie didn’t meet Jasper here. They went to school together. Don’t you go to school with him, too?”

I feel a guilty pang. It’s amazing how I’ve turned Cassie and Jasper into a thing that never was. It didn’t occur to me she’d think I was talking about Jasper.

“No, not Jasper. A different guy, he had glasses. Older, cute, but in a kind of geeky way,” I say. “Cassie told me he came in here one day. That was how she met him.”

Brittany shakes her head. “I don’t think so. Cassie and I were always on shift together. Besides, Nicholas won’t let any guys over the age of thirteen hang out here unless they’re somebody’s dad. Nicholas thinks everybody is a pedophile. So I can’t see how she would have met him here.”

“Oh, okay,” I say, and I want to feel like she’s gotten it wrong. But I feel just the opposite. She’s right: Cassie didn’t meet Quentin at Holy Cow. But then, where did she meet him? And why did she lie? “Thanks anyway.”

Brittany takes a couple steps from the table, but then turns back.

“I really am sorry about what happened, you know,” she says. “Cassie was a wild girl, but I liked her.”

OUR HOUSE SMELLS exactly the same, good in that weird, old-house way. Like lavender with a hint of maple syrup. And I want to be comforted by something that familiar, but all I feel is sad. Like even the smell is just another lie.

Gideon and I sit next to each other on the couch, staring down at our mom’s sealed letter, the milk shake from Holy Cow that I drank too fast sitting heavy in my stomach. Gideon went up to get the letter for me because I still wasn’t ready to face my bedroom. Downstairs, I already feel swamped by memories. Even the good ones feel terrible, too. Maybe especially the good ones. And something about telling Gideon about our mom has made me angry all over again. I got kind of lulled into Rachel’s explanations, which ring a lot less true now that I’ve relayed them to Gideon. I mean, our dad is missing, and our mom is building some coalition? That might be noble. It might even make her feel like a hero. But we need her home, right now.

“You want me to open it?” Gideon asks after we have been sitting there a really long time.

“No, I will,” I say.

My hands tremble as I finally rip open the seal. There is too much riding on what she has to say. I already know whatever’s inside won’t be enough. How can it be? My heart sinks even more when I see it’s just a single page of notebook paper, just a few short paragraphs. Gideon and I read together.

June 17

Dear Wylie,

Rachel has hopefully explained as much as she can about what happened and why. All I can say is that I’m doing the best I can to be sure you’re safe from here on out. I have already found people to help us, including a senator—I can’t wait until you meet her. She’s amazing. There’s a neuroscientist, too (a woman), who your dad has been working with. Real people. Who are smart and committed and are willing to help.

I am sure you are angry, and I know that nothing I write here will make up for the pain I have caused you. But know that everything I did was to protect you, and because I love you.

In the meantime, Rachel will help you. I am so grateful to her. Thank God for my “old lady yoga,” as you like to call it, because if she and I hadn’t run into each other, I never would have thought to go to her that night. But she was the perfect person. Anyway, let her help you. She saved my life, literally. She knows what to do. And send my love to Gideon.

It’s even harder to read than I expected. To think of her sneaking back into the house to leave it after I saw her. To feel how stupidly desperate I am still to forgive her, to find some decent explanation. It makes me feel like such an idiot.

“Is there anything she could say that would make you forgive her?” I ask. Partly because I want him to tell me how I should.

Gideon considers the question for a minute. “Probably,” he says. “People who live in glass houses, you know? You’re saying you can’t forgive her? I mean, no matter what?”

“I’m not sure,” I say, and I realize then that whether or not I can forgive my mom isn’t even the thing that’s bothering me most. I’m just not sure what is. “I’m going to call Jasper’s house, see if I can reach him.”

“You think he knows something?” Gideon asks.

“No,” I say. “But he knows me.”

Jasper’s mom answers on the third ring. “Hello?” Mad, already. Like we’re in the middle of an argument. And she doesn’t even know it’s me. Things are only going to go downhill once she figures that out.

“Can I please speak to Jasper?” I ask brightly.

“He’s not here,” she snaps. On second thought, she knows exactly who I am.

“Oh, I, um, tried his cell phone, and it’s not working. . . .”

Dead silence. She also knows that Jasper’s phone isn’t working. She is maybe even the reason why.

“Could you tell him that Wylie called?” I ask. “And that I’m home?”

“I am not telling him a goddamn thing.”

Click.

She’s hung up on me. My chest is burning as I grip my phone. I know that I shouldn’t take her venom personally. But that’s easier said than done.

I still have the phone in my hand when the doorbell rings. I want to feel a happy surge: it’s Jasper! But already I know it’s not.

“I’ll check who it is,” Gideon offers as he gets up to peek out the window. He turns back to me. “Rachel.”

Gideon opens the door and Rachel steps into the foyer, dressed, as usual, in an elegant, perfectly tailored black suit and expensive-looking four-inch black platform heels. Rachel’s thousand-dollar rock-star shoes are her screw-you to lawyerly convention. Somehow, she makes this seem brave.

“Glad to see you made it home,” she says, and there goes a bolt of lightning. Her feeling, gone before it’s even really there. And right now I am definitely too worn out to chase it. “I just wanted to check in and make sure everything was okay.”

I stare at her. “I was just sitting here reading the note my not-dead mom left me. So define ‘okay.’”

“Oh, right,” she says, looking past me. Perplexed. (Maybe.) Flash. Crackle. Gone. “Well, I came by to remind you of the bail conditions: greater Newton area. They can use it against you at trial if you violate, even by accident, not to mention that they will revoke your bail, instantly. It’s not worth it.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” I say. Though I am already pretty sure this is yet another of my lies.

“Good. Also, we got the first set of discovery disclosures from the prosecutor’s office today,” Rachel goes on, glad to change the subject. Now her feelings are steady, loud and clear: calm, confident, focused. Whenever we talk about my case is the only time they are ever like that. “They’re, let’s just say, interesting.”

“Interesting how?” Gideon asks when I am too slow on the uptake.

“They’re thin,” she says, pleased with herself now. “Like remember those matches they supposedly had in the first interview?”

“What about them?” I feel a flutter in my chest. The matches really bothered me, right from the start. If they did find matches under my bed, I worried that maybe I did do something awful to Teresa and just don’t remember. Because in some small, dark corner of my mind, I still don’t trust myself, not completely.

“They’ve disappeared, apparently.” Rachel shakes her head in disbelief. “Now, I don’t know if they lost them or if they never had them or what. But they’re gone.”

“That’s great news, right?” Gideon asks, looking over at me. I’m afraid there’s a catch. “Does that mean they’ll drop their case?”

Rachel shakes her head again. “I wouldn’t get ahead of ourselves. They still have proof that the fire at the hospital was intentional. It was ‘constructed from combustible materials.’ Meaning, apparently, whoever set it didn’t need a match.”

“Maybe Teresa?” I ask. I’ve thought a lot about that excitement I sensed from Teresa at the weirdest times. Like she knew something big was coming.

“Pretty sure they still have you in mind.”

“Combustible materials? They grabbed me off the bridge,” I say. “Not to mention, they took everything off me. How would I even have—whatever that is—to set a fire?”

Rachel takes a breath and looks down, like she’s reluctant to say the rest. To spare my feelings. No, like she knows she should feel that way. No flash. No crackle. I don’t think she feels anything. “Jasper is their theory. They have him on tape, remember, sneaking in to see you.”

For a split second I feel betrayed by Jasper. Even though I know he wasn’t involved. That’s the true danger of the most outrageous lies. Somehow they take on the possibility of truth.

“But he didn’t—”

“It doesn’t matter what actually happened, obviously,” Rachel says. “It matters what they can get a jury to believe.”

“Then make sure that doesn’t happen!” Gideon snaps, and he’s pissed. Probably more about our mom for him. “Isn’t that your job?”

Anger. (Maybe.) Flash. Crackle. Gone. That’s fair: she saved my mom’s life, got me out of jail. How much more is she really expected to do?

“There’s a limit to my control over this situation,” she says carefully and calmly, and this much is definitely true. “I will do the best I can, but there will be regular people with their own imperfect opinions involved—juries, prosecutors. These people make random, stupid choices.”

“Did the police ever find Quentin?” I ask, partly to change the subject, partly because I do feel way more bothered about his whereabouts now that I’m out.

Rachel frowns and shakes her head. But I feel a twinge of something. Flash, then gone. I am pretty sure it could have been guilt, though.

“You did ask them to find him, right? You told them he was at the jail, that he was alive?”

“I made a judgment call, Wylie.”

“What? You told me you were looking into it!” I shout. And—stupidly—I feel like I’m going to cry. “He could be anywhere!”

Scared. That’s how I really feel. Quentin being alive and out here makes me scared. I don’t want to give him that power. But it’s a fact.

“In my judgment, admitting that Quentin visited you in jail could make you look like his accomplice, Wylie. It could even end up linking you to Cassie’s death, which, you know, was another theory they have—that you’ve killed a girl with fire before.” Rachel stares me straight in the eye. Calm. Steady. Controlled. “They probably never would have found Quentin anyway. It’s not like they have sophisticated resources. I’m sorry that I lied to you. But I truly thought it was in your best interest.”

I wonder for a second whether she thinks I imagined Quentin or made up that he came. I never told Jasper about Quentin coming to see me, that I knew for sure he was alive. And that’s the real reason, I think. I was afraid that maybe it never happened.

“But what if Quentin has our dad?” I ask.

“He doesn’t have your dad,” Rachel says. Guilt. (Maybe.) Flash. Crackle. Gone. She feels absolutely 100 percent sure of this fact, though. But then again, people who are totally sure can also be totally wrong. Being an Outlier has taught me that much. “And if he does, I swear to you, Wylie, I will make it my mission in life to track him down myself and make sure he pays.”

Impatience. (Maybe.)

Flash. Crackle. Gone.

“Doesn’t somebody at least have to explain the whole thing in the hospital? Like the NIH or that doctor involved, Cornelia,” Gideon says, forcing himself to ask despite—or maybe because of—his shame about anything where Cornelia is concerned. “Doesn’t he have to answer for something?”

Rachel shrugs. “The federal government has said all they are going to say about the incident at the hospital, apparently. That’s what an NIH assistant general counsel and a US attorney have told me.”

“They can’t do that, can they?” Gideon asks.

“When the government shouts ‘in the name of safety and security,’ they can pretty much do whatever they want. Besides, if we want to fight that battle we can, but later on. Right now, I have to focus on keeping Wylie out of jail.”

“And finding our dad,” I add firmly.

“Of course,” Rachel says. Flash. Gone. Too fast for me to even guess. I wonder if she’s already given up on my dad. Rachel stands and checks her Cartier watch. “Unfortunately, I’ve got a meeting I was supposed to be at fifteen minutes ago. We should catch up more later, Wylie. Oh, I almost forgot.” She pauses before reaching our door, starts digging in her bag and pulls out some pages. “Your mom sent some emails for me to pass on to you. I printed them out. I’ll leave them for you to read.” She puts the pages down on the side table near the door. “Oh, and she needs those pictures you took from my house.”

Crap. My mom’s pictures. I never should have taken them. But I am annoyed my mom cares about them now. We’ve got so many other things—like where my dad is—that matter so much more.

“I don’t have the pictures anymore,” I say. “I had to swim to get away from those agents.”

“So you just . . .”

“I had to leave them,” I say. And that is the truth. It’s also all I’m going to say. Even if Riel still has the pictures—which is doubtful under the circumstances—she’s underground now. There is no way I could find her. Or maybe I just don’t want to. Not just to give my mom what she wants.

“Oh, okay,” Rachel says, trying to sound nonchalant. “Don’t worry. It’s no big deal. The pictures aren’t that important.”

But when she smiles back at me one last time from the doorway, I can feel one thing absolutely loud and clear: nothing could be further from the truth.

THE WASHINGTON NATIONAL

IN WIDE-OPEN FIELD, IT COULD COME DOWN TO A BATTLE BETWEEN EXPERIENCE AND INNOVATION, FEAR AND OPTIMISM

May 20

It’s early days. This presidential race can’t even officially be called a race yet, but the potential contenders thus far are a wildly divergent pack.

On the one hand, there are possible candidates like Lana Harrison, the senator from California, who rose to prominence in the recent fight to reform health care and expand civil rights. On the other end of the spectrum is Senator David Russo, who, after a distinguished military career, joined the Senate Armed Services Committee, where he has had a stern eye fixed on national security. Lately, though, his focus has shifted to privacy, which has thrown even some in his own party for a loop.

Lana Harrison says that—rhetoric notwithstanding—Russo’s end goal is just the opposite. That Russo seeks to limit individual freedom, not protect it. The real question now is: Who will voters believe?

JASPER

JASPER REACHES FOR HIS PHONE TO SILENCE THE ALARM. HE’S IN SUCH A DEAD sleep, it takes a minute to remember where he is: the dorm, BC. Right. Jasper and his roommate, Chance, have gotten into the habit of taking naps after early-morning hockey practice. When you’re eighteen and up before five thirty a.m., then on the ice for three hours, that’s what you do.

With his phone in his hand finally, Jasper taps off the alarm.

“I am not going to let that girl drive your whole life off into a ditch,” his mom had snapped at him the day after Wylie was hauled off to the detention facility. When she was blaming Wylie for him not going to BC. “She’s damaged goods. Please tell me I raised you well enough to see that.”

The anger balloons in his chest, being reminded of how much his mom cares about hockey camp, because she’s after some NHL pie in the sky and the money that might go along with it. Wait. No. That’s not how his mom really feels. Wylie has told him more than once: his mom’s worry and love just look like anger. The actual truth is that she cares about him, not hockey. Or so Wylie says. Jasper’s still working on believing her.

If only his mom knew that Wylie is her biggest defender. But to do that he’d have to tell her that he’s been hanging out with Wylie in the detention facility. And it’s better not to go there. His mom would panic, angry panic. She’s chilled out a lot thinking Wylie is out of the picture. And, yeah, going to hockey camp like both Wylie and his mom wanted was a good call. It’s where he is supposed to be. Jasper believes that now. At least, most days.

Jasper puts his brand-new iPhone down gently on the desk that’s jammed up against the head of his bed in the small double room he and Chance share. The new phone was a gift from his mom before he headed off for BC. A gift she definitely couldn’t afford, one that was supposed to be a reward for him “doing the right thing.” It made him feel extra guilty every time he talked to Wylie.

Jasper’s bed squeaks loudly as he sits up, and Chance makes the same sick, wet noise he does whenever he wakes up: surprised Scooby-Doo. Most of what Chance says and does is some shade of Scooby-Doo.

“Shut that thing off,” Chance mumbles into his pillow, same as he does each day. Like the alarm’s not already off. Like Jasper’s a pain in his ass. But Chance counts on Jasper to get them both up in the morning and again in the afternoon. Otherwise, Chance would sleep all day. No surprise, Jasper likes being the guy who can be counted on. And that’s the great thing about college: you can decide to be only the best parts of who you are.

Apart from the noises, Chance is a decent guy, too. Straight-up. He’s from Terre Haute, Indiana, not exactly known for ice hockey, but it’s there according to Chance. He says it’s mostly corn and nice people, and once upon a time that might have sounded boring to Jasper. But these days, boring doesn’t sound half bad.

“Your problem, Jasper, is that you think too much,” Chance likes to say. “More time living and less time thinking, my man.”

And it seems to work for Chance. He’s at Boston College to play hockey, get drunk, and find girls. In that order. Anything outside those three buckets he tosses like a wrong-shaped peg. Chance believes life is simple. And so it is. Meanwhile, Jasper isn’t sure about anything. Except Wylie. Each day he is more sure about her.

Wylie is the reason he finally decided to go to BC preseason, and not just to keep his mind off her being gone. Wylie told Jasper he needed to go to BC back when she barely knew him. And she never wavered.

By the time everything with the hospital had happened, Jasper joined preseason late. It wasn’t easy convincing the BC hockey coach to give him a chance. Jasper decided to go with the truth—Cassie and Wylie and the camp and the bridge and then the hospital. All of it out in a rush. Coach had sat there listening with his scraggly, scrunched-up eyebrows. When Jasper was finally done with his wild story, the coach stayed quiet for a crazy long time. Like he was about to drop some serious knowledge.

“Okay” was all he finally said, looking Jasper square in the eye. “But you miss a game or a practice from here on out, you screw up at all, you’re gone. You’re lucky as hell Samuels is out with a concussion. I got no choice but to take you on, despite the fact that you sound like you could be delusional. Consider yourself already out of strikes.”

Strikes. There it was finally. Like father, like son. The judge had said basically the same thing when he’d sentenced Jasper’s dad to fifteen years for aggravated assault. “I’m sorry, Mr. Salt, but you are out of strikes.”

And fair enough. Jasper’s dad had already been arrested more times than Jasper could count. And what he’d done that night was so much worse than anything that had come before. It wasn’t just evil. It was animal.

The guy in front of them was driving like a dumb-ass, weaving all over the place, slowing way down, then jerking to a stop. They could see that he was on his cell phone. Stupid, no doubt. But it wasn’t until Jasper’s dad had to jerk so hard to stop that he dropped his cigarette in his lap that he became a train cut loose on the tracks.

“No, Dad!” Jasper had called after him.

But he was already out of the car.

“Don’t,” Jasper had whispered inside the empty car as he watched his dad through the windshield, up ahead on the slick road, shouting through the window at the driver of the other car. But watch was all Jasper did. Because he was only twelve at the time. And there was only so much that twelve could do.

Jasper had actually been relieved when the other man got out and was much bigger than his dad. Big enough, he figured, to easily knock Jasper’s dad back in his place. But rage, Jasper learned that night, can make a man many times his natural size.

By the time Jasper was outside the car screaming, “Stop! Stop! Dad, stop it!” his dad’s fists were covered in blood, and the man was on the ground, motionless.

All these years later, Jasper tries not to picture the way the guy’s face had looked after—lumpy and wet and bright red. It’s his dad’s face that haunts him more late at night. The way it looks far too much like his own.

“IN A WAY, I am like him,” Jasper said during one of his many visits to Wylie at the detention facility.

It wouldn’t have been Jasper’s first pick for a date locale, but he was getting used to it. On the upside, they had no choice but to really get to know each other. And Jasper was cool sitting anywhere with Wylie. Had he felt that way about other girls? Maybe. Jasper fell hard and he fell often—his mom was right about that. But that didn’t mean this time with Wylie couldn’t be different. That it wasn’t special.

“You’re nothing like your dad,” Wylie said.

“Come on, that kid that I choked in that Level99 place, the kid I punched in school. I snap, like, a lot of the time,” Jasper said, staring at Wylie so hard his eyes had begun to burn. “I may not be the same as my dad, but I’m not sure I’m all that different.”

And it mattered to Jasper that she didn’t pretend otherwise. He wanted her to know the worst of him (the parts even he hated) and to care about him anyway.

“So, whatever. Even if that is true. You still get to decide what to make of who you are,” Wylie said finally. “Dr. Shepard said that to me, about being an Outlier and being anxious and everything. There’s a lot of gray in the world, Jasper. Wanting to hit someone isn’t the same thing as hitting them. And hitting someone once, or even twice, doesn’t mean you have to be someone who hits forever. Not everything is black and white.”

Jasper looked up at Wylie then. He wasn’t sure if she believed what she was saying. But he was sure that he was falling for her different than ever before. For real. In love. That maybe he was already all the way there.

INSTEAD OF WORKING out with Chance today, Jasper heads home. His mom has been asking him to come every day since he started at camp, and he’s been avoiding her. Partly to get back at her. Even though, to Wylie’s point, his mom is doing her best. And he should know better than anyone that your best isn’t always as good as you’d hoped it would be.

“Oh, you’re here!” his mom calls out as she swings open the door, like she was just sitting there, waiting for him. She’s so happy that she’s pumping up and down on her toes. Jasper feels like an ass. He should have come sooner.

“Yep,” he says, stepping inside. “Here I am.”

“Well, let me see what I have to feed you.” His mom hustles toward the kitchen like she didn’t just get home from a double shift at the hospital. Like she isn’t probably so beat she can barely stand. “I think there’s a lasagna. But that could take a while to heat up. Oh, I wish you’d told me you’d be coming today. I’d have made something special. How about grilled cheese?”

Jasper nods. “Sounds good.” He hates grilled cheese. It’s something his mom has always refused to know. It’s right that he should be forced to eat it now as punishment.

A FEW MINUTES later, Jasper sits staring down at the sandwich that he doesn’t want. But his mom is watching him, and the whole point of coming here is to make her feel better. The least Jasper can do is eat the damn sandwich. He takes a huge bite and chugs a bunch of water to wash it down.

“How was practice this morning?” his mom asks. She sounds nervous. Probably afraid of giving Jasper a reason not to come back. “The other boys on the team still okay?”

Jasper nods. And they are okay. Everything is okay. Sometimes he still has to remind himself. “Preseason is good, really good. You were right about it,” he says. “Chance, my roommate, is a nice guy. Coach is great. A hard-ass. But great.”

His mom nods and forces something of a smile. “That’s wonderful,” she says, but her voice catches.

“Mom, what’s wrong?”

Suddenly, she grasps Jasper’s hand, making him startle back. Her fingers are icy, bony. So old, all of a sudden. “I just don’t want you getting distracted, that’s all. Especially not after all the work you’ve put in getting your life back on track.”

“Distracted by what?” he asks. “I was just telling you it was all good.”

“By whatever.” His mom’s eyes dart away. Jasper can’t read shit, but she is a terrible liar. “I’m just saying. You’re doing well. It’s a good thing. We should keep it that way.”

Jasper raises an eyebrow. “Mom, what is up?”

“Nothing’s ‘up’!” she shouts, twisting a napkin so tight it begins to tear. Then she jerks to her feet and starts clearing the dishes. “I just worry about you. That’s what a mother is supposed to do.”

This is her loving me. This is her loving me, he tells himself. But it’s just so hard to believe.

“Mom, I know you only want what’s best for me,” he says. “And you were definitely right about me needing to go to hockey camp and BC. I totally admit that. It’s been really good for me to be there. So thank you for encouraging me to go.”

She takes a loud breath, then smiles up at him. Her eyes are glassy. “I’m so glad.”

“And I’m being straight with you now. So you be straight with me. Why are you all wound up?” he asks. “What’s going on?”

His mom takes another deep breath, looks down at the table, and crosses her arms. “She’s out,” she says finally.

“Who’s out?” Jasper’s heart has begun to pound.

His mom looks up at him and shakes her head, eyes brimming with tears now. “That girl,” she says, the tears finally making their way onto her cheeks. “The girl.”

“Wylie?” Jasper almost shouts. “She’s out of jail?”

His mom nods. “She called here,” she says reluctantly.

“What? When?” Jasper snatches his phone and taps hard through the call log. “She didn’t call me.”

“Not long ago. Couple hours. She doesn’t have your new number.”

“You gave it to her, right?”

“I did not,” his mom says firmly.

“Why not?” Jasper shouts.

“To protect you,” she exclaims, like this should be the most obvious thing. “And I know it’s not going to be easy to stay away. But it’s already been weeks since you’ve seen her. You’re already out of the habit. A clean break. That’s all you need. Don’t get yourself tied into knots again. You got out, Jasper. Keep it that way.”

But Jasper is already on his feet. She’s out. She’s out. That’s all he can think. “I have to go.” He’s moving quickly toward the door.

“Jasper!” his mom shouts after him. “You have a real chance now. Don’t throw your life away for another girl.”

Jasper forces himself to stay calm as he turns back at the door. He can do this. He can say no but stay kind. Respectful.

“I’ll be careful, Mom,” he says, opening the door behind him and backing toward it. “But I need to go see Wylie, right now.”

His mom’s face is slick with tears.

“Jasper!” she shouts one last time as he steps through the door. “Why do you need them all so much?”

JASPER TRIES TO steady himself as he drives toward Wylie’s house in his old red Jeep—officially his since he paid his brother five hundred dollars for it. Why do you need them all so much? It’s ringing in his head. Because his mom isn’t wrong, in general. She’s just wrong in particular about Wylie.

Jasper pauses at a stop sign as he approaches downtown Newton, meets eyes with a cop parked there, waiting for people to blow through. A reminder: be careful. But Jasper can do this. He can have Wylie in his life and keep himself on the straight and narrow. It doesn’t have to be either-or.

Though it is eating at him that Wylie didn’t even mention she might be getting out. He just saw her and not a word? Jasper wants not to be hurt. Wants not to feel suspicious. But he is. And he does.

Another five minutes of driving, and Jasper stops again—this time at a red light, ready to turn right toward Wylie’s part of town. The so-much-nicer-than-where-Jasper-lives part. Those differences between him and Wylie don’t matter. At least so far they haven’t. But then Jasper and Wylie have been together together in a bubble. What if things are different between them in the real world? What if that’s why Wylie didn’t tell Jasper she was getting out? Does she have doubts?

A horn blasts behind Jasper. The light has turned green, and he’s been sitting there, lost in the tangle of Wylie loves me. She loves me not. He startles, punches down hard on the gas, and lifts the clutch. The old Jeep hesitates before finally lurching forward.

Almost instantly, there’s a vicious crunch. And then a yelp. Jasper’s eyes shoot up as the horn behind him sounds again.

“Shit,” he gasps, jamming the Jeep into park. He claws at his door. “Oh, shit.”

He jumps out, hands shaking, heart pumping as he races around to the front of the Jeep.

“Oh God, did he hit somebody?” a man shouts from somewhere behind. “Holy crap.”

Jasper sees the bike first. The wheel bent, but otherwise in one piece. And then the girl, sitting on the ground, gripping her knee. Her eyes are open. She’s breathing.

He finally exhales.

“Are you okay, honey?” An old woman rushes past Jasper and kneels down next to the girl. “Don’t get up. You need to take your time. Did you hit your head? You could have a concussion.” The woman has short, gray hair and a frumpy tent dress. She turns and gives Jasper the most hateful stink-eye. “Were you on your phone? You were, weren’t you? You could have killed somebody! You could have killed her!”

“I’m sorry. Are you okay?” Jasper asks the girl.

She looks down at herself. “Yeah, I think—”

“So stupid!” the old man piles on as he rushes up from behind.

“You honked at me,” Jasper says quietly, though he knows that getting into it with them is stupid, pointless.

“I’m calling an ambulance. And the cops!” the woman barks, pulling out her phone. She looks him up and down, disgusted. “What kind of person are you?”

“It was an accident!” Jasper shouts back, his face hot. “A mistake. People make them!”

“Stupid, that’s what you are.” The man steps closer, spitting and red-faced. “Are you stupid?”

“Stop saying that, man,” Jasper growls, his fists clenched. He swallows down the urge to use them. Don’t hit him, he’s old. Don’t hit him, he’s old, Jasper chants to himself. But he’s not sure it is working. He can feel the punch already, the impact.

“Stop yelling! Please!” the girl shouts, startling the old couple. She waves her hands. “It was my fault. I ran the light.” She pushes herself unsteadily to her feet. She is pretty and fit in her high-tech, expensive-looking bicycle clothes, even those old-school sweatbands on her wrists and, luckily, a helmet. When she takes it off, her long, dark hair falls over her shoulders. “Please don’t call the police. My parents will be mad at me for not paying attention. They’re always on me for that. And I’m fine anyway.”

Jasper feels a guilty wave of relief. He’d be much happier, all things considered, if they didn’t call the police. His mom would say this proved her point about Wylie being a bad distraction. Coach might consider it his last strike.

“I really am sorry,” Jasper manages, meeting eyes with the girl for the first time. They shimmer between hazel and gold, like two small kaleidoscopes. Jasper’s never seen eyes like that. For a second, he forgets what he was saying. “Um, I didn’t see you.”

“Well, of course you didn’t see her,” the woman snorts.

“You kids and your damn cell phones,” her husband adds.

“I wasn’t on my phone,” Jasper says, and pretty mildly, considering how far up in his face they are. “I was distracted for a second and then you blew your horn—I don’t know what happened. She said she went through the light.”

“It was totally my fault,” the girl confirms as she moves her bike off to the shoulder. The wheel is so bent. There is no way she is riding it anywhere. “I’m not used to so many traffic lights.”

“I’ll drive you home,” Jasper offers. “We can throw your bike in the back.”

He hates the idea of not going straight to Wylie’s right this second. But what choice does he have? He hit this girl with his car.

“If anyone is going to drive her, it should be us,” the woman says. “You should go get yourself some driving lessons.”

The girl looks the woman right in the eye. “Thank you for stopping,” she says, calm but fierce. “But if you could stop yelling, that would be great. I know it’s making you feel good, but it’s not helping me. I already have a headache. And maybe you should worry less about me and more about why your husband is so jacked up that he was laying on the horn like that in the first place.”

“Ugh.” The woman recoils, disgusted. She waves at her husband to come along. “Let’s go. They deserve each other.”

And with that, the two march back toward their Buick sedan.

“THANK YOU,” JASPER says when the couple is finally pulling away.

The girl shrugs. “The biggest jerks always spend the most time pointing fingers.”

Jasper smiles. She’s right about that. “Anyway, sorry again. I’m really glad you’re okay. I should have been paying more attention.”

She tilts her head. “You seem really invested in jamming yourself under the nearest bus. I said I ran the light.”

Jasper feels himself blush. He wants to put his hands up to his face to cover it. “Let me give you a ride home,” he says. “It’ll help me get out from under the bus.”

She looks down at her bike, taking in how damaged it really is. Finally, she nods. “Okay.”

IT ISN’T UNTIL Jasper has her bike loaded into his Jeep and is finally pulling into traffic that he thinks about Wylie again. But maybe the delay is a good thing. To calm him down. He does wish he could call Wylie to let her know he is on his way. But, conveniently, he doesn’t have her number programmed into his brand-new iPhone. God, his mom is good.

“They couldn’t roll over your contacts, for some reason,” she had said when she gave it to him.

But he hadn’t cared at the time. Wylie didn’t like to talk on the phone from the detention facility. She said it was too awkward, people waiting in line, listening to your conversation. Not that he could have called her there anyway. Wylie’s cell number was the only one he really cared about, and with Wylie locked away that hadn’t mattered either until now.

But that’s okay. He’ll drop this girl wherever she wants to go, then he’ll calmly and slowly drive back to Wylie’s house. And he’ll focus. Because even if he doesn’t want it to be, hitting this girl was a reminder: bad things can happen when you’re distracted. Even by somebody you love.

“I’m Lethe, by the way,” the girl says, bringing Jasper back. He’s been inching down Newton’s main street, so totally distracted again.

“I’m Jasper,” he says. “Where to, Lethe?”

“I’m at BC. The campus is just—”

“I know where it is,” Jasper says, and too forcefully. “I mean, I just started there, too, preseason hockey camp.”

Lethe smiles tentatively, motions to herself. “Lacrosse.”

And Jasper feels that familiar tug—it’s fate. He knows that’s stupid, that he is stupid for feeling some kind of connection—even for a second—with some random girl he hit with his car on the way to see Wylie. But old habits die hard. And no one’s perfect. Not Jasper. Not Wylie. Right now all he can do is be polite and responsible and get this girl who he hit with his car home. As fast as he can.

“Lacrosse?” he asks as he focuses again on the road. “That’s cool. I would have taken you for a cyclist.”

“I’d rather be a cyclist for sure,” Lethe says. “But there aren’t any cycling scholarships for girls. And I happen to be really good at lacrosse. So my parents are just like, ‘do that,’ because who I am and what I want don’t even matter.”

Jasper turns to look at her after he stops squarely at a red light. She seems embarrassed.

“Sorry. I probably sound like a spoiled brat,” she says. “I’m grateful, don’t get me wrong. I’m just also really annoyed. Does that make sense?”

“Completely,” Jasper says. Lethe is describing exactly the way he feels now. “My mom works her ass off to give me, like, everything. But I still wish I had, I don’t know, more options or something.”

Lethe turns and looks at Jasper for a long time. “Exactly,” she says. “You know, not that many people are willing to admit it, though. Whenever I say something like that, I always end up feeling like a monster.”

Jasper smiles, shrugs. “I have low standards.”

She nods. “So if you’re at BC, what were you doing all the way over here?”

“I was going to see a friend,” he says.

“Oh, I don’t want to hold you up,” she says. “If she’s expecting you.”

Did Lethe nail the she in a way that was supposed to be a flag or something, or did Jasper just imagine that?

“She’s not,” he says. “I was going to surprise her.”

“Oh,” Lethe says—and like she wants to ask something more but doesn’t.

THE TWO OF them are quiet then as Jasper drives the rest of the way to campus. Finally, Lethe points toward a gate up ahead. “I’m in Mavis Hall. You can drop me on the corner. It’s faster to cut through from here.”

Jasper double-parks at the curb. “I’ll get your bike.”

It isn’t until Jasper pulls the bike out of the back that he sees just how messed up it is, totally unusable, actually. When Lethe gets out, they stare down at it together.

“Let me get it fixed,” he says, turning to look at her. In the sun, her eyes shimmer. “It would make me feel better.”

“No, I can just . . .” But then she frowns. “Can I just say okay?”

Jasper smiles. “I hit you with my car. You can say whatever you want.”

“Let’s start with fixing the bike.”

And when Lethe smiles this time, her whole face glows. She pushes her hair out of her eyes and looks down. She has a leather cuff on one wrist. It’s the kind of thing that Cassie would have worn. Cassie. Wylie. Lethe? Why do you need them all so much? But his mom is wrong. He’s just being polite with this girl. It’s not an actual situation they’re having. Jasper wants to be with Wylie. He cares about her, a lot.

After Jasper puts the bike back in his Jeep, he and Lethe exchange numbers. Then there is a long, strange silence in which Jasper almost tells Lethe that she should know that he is actually in love with Wylie and he is just being nice, fixing her bike. Luckily, he manages to keep his mouth shut.

“I’ll call you as soon as the bike is done,” he says instead. “Good luck with lacrosse.”

“Thanks.” Lethe smiles as she turns for the gate. “Good luck with hockey.”

WYLIE

“THE HOSPITAL SENT YOUR PHONE BACK,” GIDEON SAYS WHEN I FINALLY GET back downstairs from the longest shower I have ever taken. He puts the phone down in front of me on the coffee table. “I charged it for you, too. I mean, it probably has like nine kinds of tracing crap embedded on it. You should take a look at your missed messages or whatever. Then we should burn it.”

Gideon thinking to charge my phone feels like the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me. I stare down at it and try not to cry.

“Thanks,” I manage.

When I turn it on, one hundred and thirty-six texts flood in. Jasper accounts for 90 percent of the messages, all sent in the twenty-four hours between when he saw me grabbed on the bridge and when he finally snuck his way into the hospital and found me, all some version of “Where are you?” or “Are you okay?”

None of the messages are from today. It’s already two thirty p.m. now, and I still haven’t heard from him. Jasper’s mom might not have told him that I called, except I have a hard time believing that—I feel like he knows I’m out. And yet he hasn’t called, hasn’t come looking. I want it not to nag at me, but it does.

After tapping onto Jasper’s old messages, the number of total unread ones drops to twenty-three. A few of the others are from Gideon. They also came in while I was in the hospital, after he stormed out of the house that morning so angry at Dad and me. Before he knew anything bad had happened.

Gideon sees his messages, too. “Wait, um, I don’t think I would—”

“It’s okay,” I say, knowing as well as he does that whatever he had to say to me then probably wasn’t very nice. “I’ll delete them.”

“Read the one from Dad, though,” he says, pointing.

“Oh,” I say, surprised to see it there. “That’s weird.”

Because it was sent the day I was grabbed, but at three p.m., after I talked to my dad from the hospital. By then, he knew I didn’t have my phone. Why would he have been bothering to send me messages? I have such a bad feeling as I tap on the message.

It’s just a single word: Cassie. That’s the whole of it. It makes me shudder.

“What does that mean?” Gideon asks. “‘Cassie’?”

“I don’t know.”

Breathe, I remind myself. Breathe. But it’s not easy with all the facts crowding in. First I’m drawn to Cassie’s house, then Holy Cow, and now here’s a text from my dad with just Cassie’s name? These things have to be related. I’m just afraid to find out how.

Jasper. Now I really want him here. He is the only person who would truly understand why this has me so freaked out. He was the one who was with me when Cassie died. He was there with me in the hospital, as we swam away from Russo’s house in the dark. But my only option to find him now would be to go to the BC campus to search. And I will if I have to, but I would so much rather he just showed up at my door. But why? What am I afraid I might find? Another girl? I wish I was more sure that wasn’t exactly what I was worried about.

I turn back to my unread texts, hoping to keep myself from thinking any more about it. Wylie, Dr. Shepard checking in. I am always here if you need to talk. Call anytime. Five days later, while I was still in the detention facility, there is another: Wylie, Dr. Shepard again. Getting a little concerned now that you’ve missed two appointments. I haven’t been able to reach your dad, either. I’m sure you’re fine. Just check in. And then the last one from her, one week ago—a week into my being locked up: Spoke to Gideon. I heard what happened. Coming to see you.

“ARE YOU OKAY?” Dr. Shepard asked as I sat down across from her in the detention facility visiting room. “Sorry, that was a stupid question. I’m sure ‘okay’ isn’t the best word to describe how you are. How are you feeling?”

Dr. Shepard laid her hands on the tabletop. And I so desperately wanted to grab them. I just needed so badly to know that I was going to be okay. I wanted to feel some promise seeping through the surface of her skin. But touching wasn’t allowed, and I had never in my life touched Dr. Shepard. Besides, that wasn’t a promise she could make.

“I didn’t do this,” I said.

“Of course you didn’t,” she said.

And she was so genuinely sure of this fact—like without an ounce of doubt. It made me start to cry. Hard and out of nowhere. I’d been working so hard to keep it together, hadn’t cried once since they arrested me. But as soon as the tears started, I could not make them stop. Soon I was sobbing so loud that a guard came over to investigate. Luckily, he just kept walking.

“Sorry,” I said when my tears finally slowed and I was able to take a breath.

“You don’t need to apologize.” Dr. Shepard reached over to give my hand a quick, forbidden squeeze. “I’d cry if I was in here, too.”

“My anxiety is out of control,” I said. “I can’t remember what it’s like to take a deep breath.”

“That’s understandable,” Dr. Shepard said. “You’ve never had less control over your surroundings. How are you coping?”

“I’m not, I guess.” I shrugged. “I almost passed out once. A guard told me they’d put me in solitary if I did.”

Anger popped Dr. Shepard’s eyes wide open.

“No, no, no,” she said, with a shake of her head. And wow, was she pissed. She looked around the room, as if searching for someone to attack. “That definitely won’t happen again. I’ll make sure of it. They’re legally obligated to make accommodations for your anxiety. Certainly they can’t punish you for it.” She took a breath, tried to calm herself. “But we should focus on what you can do in the meantime. I know that breathing exercises don’t always work for you. But your options in here are limited. How about visualization? We did that once, right? Where you picture a place that makes you happy?”

“My happy place?” I asked, trying to smile.

Dr. Shepard smiled, too. “Yes, your happy place. Believe it or not, it does work.”

“I’m just not sure where that is anymore,” I said, and Dr. Shepard just nodded. “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course,” she said, grateful for the chance to maybe have an answer for something.

“I know you can’t tell me details of why you saw her or whatever because of confidentiality, but how did you meet Teresa?”

Dr. Shepard’s eyebrows bunched up. “Teresa?”

“I don’t know her last name. I was in the hospital with her. She told me she was your patient. She was the girl who died in the fire.” Dr. Shepard looked skeptical. “She lived with her grandmother? Small with big glasses. She even talked about your red chair.”

“I’m sorry, Wylie. But I’ve never had a patient named Teresa. And I would remember. That’s my mother’s name.”

“So you never sent your patients to take my dad’s tests?” That’s what I’d been assuming.

“My patients?” She looked shocked by the suggestion. “That would be unethical, at least potentially. Not to mention that using a sample of only people already in therapy for a psychological experiment would certainly affect your dad’s results.”

It wasn’t until that moment that I realized how much I had made up. So many false connections, so many blanks filled in based on one wrong assumption. No, not assumption. Teresa had brought up Dr. Shepard. I wasn’t inventing that.

“Oh,” I said, trying not to let my mind spin out into even more troubling explanations.

“I’m sorry, Wylie,” Dr. Shepard went on. “I feel as though I’ve let you down.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I was pretty let down already.”

WHEN THE DOORBELL rings a second time, Gideon and I both flinch. Rachel coming back so soon doesn’t feel like a good thing, not at all.

“It could be Jasper,” Gideon offers hopefully.

“I don’t think so,” I say as I head over to look out the window alongside the door.

I blink once, hard. But unfortunately, when I open my eyes, it is still definitely Jasper’s mom standing there on our front porch. Still looking pissed. I take a breath, my hand on the knob. When I finally yank open the door, it’s like I’m pulling off a Band-Aid.

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