“What are you doing?” I called out.

She flinched, and the top of her head banged into the window frame.

“Hey, are you okay?” I asked. I walked over to underneath her. The house didn’t have high ceilings so upstairs wasn’t that far up.

“If Mrs. Cowley likes photos so much she can have them!” Alexandra kept trying to arc them over the fence, but the wind smeared them around the yard.

I picked up another at random. It was a blurry, blobby baby picture. My mom had pictures like that of me, from back in the day when you had to print a whole roll of film.

“Are you okay?” I repeated.

She looked at me with that kind of tilted head that people do when someone else is stupid.

“Hey!” I said. She retreated and shoved the window shut. I charged around to the front door. “Hey!” I repeated, pushing it open.

This was Nick’s house. There were full bookshelves everywhere. There was a cute bag on a chair, and a girly jacket on the floor. There was a table with two plates holding orange rinds and crumbs. There were two cups and two spoons, and a jagged-edged knife.

Alexandra cantered down the stairs on tottery high heels. She had on tights and a short skirt and a sweater. She hugged her arms around herself. “You’re Nick’s friend, right? What do you want?”

“Where is he?” The house was mostly open-plan. It couldn’t hide anything. Nick wasn’t there, not on this floor anyway.

“I don’t know.” Her mouth hung open in that last “oh” sound. She rubbed her thin sleeves like she was cold.

I darted past her up the steps. She chased me. “What are you doing?” One of the bedroom doors was sort of open. I pushed it the rest of the way.

The bookcase in here held old textbooks, framed certificates, and Nick’s graduation photo: He looked like an Easter bunny in the University’s traditional rabbit-fur cape and white bow around his neck. “What do you want?” she persisted.

A drawer at the bottom of the computer desk had been pulled all the way out. It was full of pictures and negatives sorted into labeled envelopes. There was the window from which she’d dumped her and Nick’s childhood.

The duvet on the single bed hung halfway off and the pillow was indented and askew. I gasped.

Alexandra hung back in the doorway. “Mum must have slept in it,” she said. “She does that sometimes. He’s really not here. I, I really don’t think he’s coming back…”

The balance of the duvet must have reached some tipping point; it suddenly sagged and something round tumbled out. It came to rest at Alexandra’s foot. It was a balled-up sock, a thick white one.

We both fell to hands and knees, like movie people ducking bullets. We stuck our faces under the bed.

There was a crumpled sweatshirt. And, where the duvet had slid off the mattress, a pair of jeans.

Alexandra squeezed the sweatshirt in her hands, but tempered her hope. “Mum might have hugged his sweatshirt in bed…”

I pulled out the jeans to read the label. Inches, not a size. Guys’ jeans. “These are his,” I said. “These are his clothes. Unless,” I added, “you had a boyfriend over last night…”

“I wasn’t even home last night!” she said, indignant, then ecstatic. Realization bloomed. “I wasn’t even home…”

There’s a famous sculpture of St. Teresa in ecstasy. The expression Bernini put into her marble face would have been enough for anybody, but he positioned a hidden window to light it, and then threw in an extravagance of enormous gilt rods behind her, just in case the rays of the real sun didn’t measure up. That’s how Alexandra looked. She looked radiant. She looked lit.

“I saw him today,” I said, reflecting her happiness. “On Chesterton Road. I really saw him!”

The money would come out of the bank tomorrow. I would leave a living Nick, and dead Harry and dead Gretchen, behind. I’d only been imagining things. They couldn’t really follow me.

Tap, tap, tap…

All my muscles squeezed together hard.

I shook myself. That was just the noise of Alexandra’s heels on the stairs. She was clattering down them because a car was pulling up.

I checked my hair in the dresser mirror. I wiped my mouth. I followed her down to see Nick one last time.

Tap, tap, tap.

Gretchen had no power over me anymore. I knew the sound for what it was: knocking on a door.

Why would Nick knock on his own door?

The stairs decanted me back into the living space. It was a big room, for everything all at once: for sitting and eating and putting on coats. Only the kitchen had a full-height interior wall, for more cabinet space, I guess. I ducked into that kitchen, behind that wall.

Alexandra opened the door to a man. She said, “Morris!” and hugged him. Morris. That was the name of Polly’s policeman.

“Alexandra,” he said. “I need to see Nick. Is he here?”

“Is he alive? Is he really alive?” She jumped in place: bounce, bounce.

The policeman said yes. There were tears and squeals and stuff out of her, but he made her focus.

“Is Nick not here?”

“I think he and Mum are out looking for me.”

Her clothes were rumpled and stretched in a way that made things pretty obvious. “Did you come home last night?”

“I was at a party. I slept at my friend Hannah’s house. I didn’t tell Mum.”

“Well, we need to call her now, all right? I need to speak to Nick.”

She came into the kitchen to use the phone on the counter, and Morris followed. I edged myself out the kitchen’s other end, onto the living room side of the wall. I bumped into a suitcase. It cracked open and leaked a tie.

“They’re on their way,” Alexandra told him, after talking to her mom. “Dad flew home early, from New York overnight. He’s upstairs asleep.”

“Really?” I blurted. That was a mistake. Before that the policeman hadn’t realized I was there.

“This is Nick’s friend,” Alexandra said, sweetly, gallantly. She was happy. She wanted us all to be best friends. She didn’t even know my name.

But he did. “Liv?” he asked, and it was totally not fair because he hadn’t even bothered to meet me when Nick was gone. He’d fobbed me off on the assistant cop, the sergeant. “No,” I said, denying it all. But he must have seen photos of all Nick’s friends, or maybe spied on us, because he knew. He knew who I was.

“Why don’t you go upstairs and wake your dad?” he suggested to Alexandra, but looking only at me.

I’d slipped the sandwich knife off the table, just in case. But it’s not like I was going to use it.

I moved toward the door. The policeman put himself between me and it.

So it was his fault.

I got hold of Alexandra’s arm. “What are you doing?” she said. The knife jumped out of my pocket and pressed into her neck.

The policeman froze.

“It’s all right, Liv,” he said evenly.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“Let her go.”

This is what makes me so angry: I wasn’t even going to do anything.

He made this kind of leap at me, shoving his hand between my hand and Alexandra’s neck. I moved as a reflex, not meaning to hurt him, but I sliced him across his knuckles.

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at hands; they’re the hardest of all body parts to draw. This one was big and had blood on it, first just straight across, then also sliding down each finger, like clothes hanging from a laundry line.

He shoved Alexandra away with it, and she fell against the table. Orange peels popped up off plates; the two coffee cups toasted with a clink before wobbling over. There was blood on her shirt now, from him. I scrambled to the door but it opened in. I had to back up to open it all the way. I felt like I lost entire minutes, maybe hours, pulling that door back.

I plunged into the outside headfirst. He grabbed me around the middle with that one good arm. I elbowed him off me, but somehow I was back in the doorway, and he blocked my exit on the stoop.