school, internships, Greg. She knew what she wanted to do, where she was headed. Kreskey, and that awful, life-altering day—those things behind her, the fears and memories locked up tight.
Then Hank. He opened up something in her. Maybe it was always there.
They walked and walked, she following him, watching him through the eye holes of the mask. It made her feel invisible somehow, like she almost wasn’t there.
The house rose in front of them, ugly and small. She nearly turned around then, chucked off the mask and started running. You owe me this much, Lara. It was the idea of that that kept her from bolting. She owed him. She did.
“Take off your coat,” he told her. “And the mask.”
He took both from her.
“When you see him, walk inside and out the back door. Wait in the car with the engine running.”
When he backed away from her, she thought she saw something flash in his eyes, which she could see through his mask, a hawk, ferruginous feathers, sharp yellow beak. Was it regret, sorrow? That’s when he stepped on a weak board on the porch, his foot falling through with a crack.
He swore a blue streak and when she tried to help him up, he pushed her away. It wasn’t him, not the man she’d given her body to, not the boy who used to give her piggyback rides. It was the other one. She hated him.
She was shaking, a quavering that started at her core and moved through her body like a virus. Her stomach was an acid roil of nerves. He freed himself and went into the house. He didn’t seem scared—at all. He was a robot again, his focus and intent only on the task at hand.
She stood there—how long?
The night was silent and so cold. All stars obscured by cloud cover, and the tops of trees. She paced the porch, avoiding the weak board. Hope ballooned—maybe he wouldn’t come. She wouldn’t let Hank talk her into this again. In fact, fuck it, she was going to call Detective Harper and tell him what they’d tried to do. She’d tell her father. Maybe not Greg—who was never going to forgive her anyway. But he didn’t need to know that she continued to sink lower and lower for this guy.
She was thinking about Greg, how alone she felt, how furious he’d be, how terrified, if he knew where she was, how wrong it all was—when she felt eyes on her, that tingling of the skin. Gaze detection.
A jolt of fear moved through her body when she saw that someone had emerged from the shadows, a bulky darkness leaking from the black all around, his face as white and round as a moon. Kreskey.
She backed away as he advanced, reaching out a hand to her, and she choked back a scream. Inside the door, Hank handed over her coat, her mask.
“Now go.”
She moved quickly, blindly, through the house, down the hall, to the kitchen, feeling her way. As she left, she saw the living room—a tarp laid out. Tools. Rope. What was he going to do, exactly? She didn’t need to know, kept moving.
The back door swung open, and the night lay out before her. She could run to the car. She could even leave him there, drive to the police station they’d passed on the way in, stop all of this before it began.
But she didn’t.
She stopped in the door frame, the cold outside a wall, her hot, ragged breath in clouds. She stood a moment, listening to the silent night, and thought about the hollow of the tree that had hidden her. The sound of her friend screaming.
Then she turned around and went back inside.
What does it mean to be strong? To be brave?
When she was young, she thought she knew the answers to those questions. It was easy—you didn’t back down from a fight, you defended your friends. You got up onstage to deliver your speech about recycling even though your stomach was queasy, and your voice shook at first. You didn’t cry when you fell off your bike.
Later, it came to mean something different.
You didn’t leave the room when your mother was living the last hour of her life, even though she didn’t know you were there, even though you wanted to get out on the street and run away, as far as you could get, wailing with all your pain and sadness.
You endured hours of mind-altering pain so that you could have a natural