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"I could." He comes down one step, and the leg still isn't right, and he pretends it is. "Yesterday I'd have argued. Then a woman told me to hand her all of her choices. Including the ones that hurt."

"She sounds insufferable."

"She's all right." He drinks his coffee. "Just don't get in the car."

It's four hundred yards down to the bend, and the frost is still on the grass.

Tomorrow this whole street will be crawling with kids in masks I sold their mothers.

I reach out the way I've been reaching for everything since yesterday.

Nothing.

I still find nothing. There’s been nothing since I woke up. There's no seam anywhere, no hum under the road, no taut bright line laid across anything, and when I put my hand out toward Lila's car, the inside of me comes back flat and empty, like a phone with the sound off.

I haven't told Gage yet.

I'm going to. Just not while he's watching me walk down the road.

So I'm going to have to do this the old fashioned way. Three years of knowledge from being friends with someone.

Lila’s in the driver's seat wearing her red coat. She sees me coming in the mirror and I watch her sit up straighter.

She leans across and pushes the passenger door open.

Don't get in the car.

Of course, I get in the car.

It's warm inside. Radio low. There's a loaf wrapped in foil on the console, still faintly warm. She's got the heater on my side turned toward me because she always does that when I drive with her.

"Hi," she says.

"I made you..."

"I see it. Thanks."

She takes her hands off the wheel and puts them in her lap. I can tell she's been crying. Not right now. But, earlier, and for a while.

"Maren, you have to leave town tonight."

"Why?"

"Just for a few days. Go to your aunt's. Take the cat. Don't go to the ball tomorrow, don't go to the shop, get in your car after dark and drive."

"Why, Lila?"

"Because tomorrow night isn't going to go the way anybody's told you it's going to go." Her chin's shaking. "That's all I can say."

"That's all you can say?"

"Yes."

I’ll try one more time. Right there in the passenger seat, six inches from her face, I go looking for whatever it is in me that's supposed to know when a person is lying.

I don’t see anything to tell me.

And I hate how badly I want that shortcut. I want a light to come on over her head telling me what my friend is.