“Your father didn’t like photographs,” her mother said. There was an edge to her voice now. “I don’t understand the point of all these questions.”

“The point, Mom, is that you’re a liar.” The words came out in a quick rush and left Dea feeling queasy—like throwing up when you really didn’t want to. “This isn’t my dad. This isn’t anyone. This is some random picture of some cheesy model you found in some cheesy discount store.”

For a second Miriam stared—white-faced, almost sullen. Then she cleared her throat and folded her hands on her lap, one on top of the other.

“All right,” she said calmly. That was the worst: how calm she was. Dea desperately wished her mother would yell. Then she could yell too, do something with the anger that was clawing its way into her throat. “You got me.”

Just those three words. You got me.

Before Dea could regret it, she hurled the photograph across the room. Her mom screamed. The glass shattered. The frame thudded to the ground.

“God, Dea.” Now her mom was shouting. “Jesus. You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

“You. Lied. To. Me.” Dea could barely get the words out.

“I had to.” Miriam sounded impatient, as if Dea was the one being unreasonable. “There are things you don’t understand, Dea. I’ve told you over and over. . . . There are things you’ll never understand. . . .” She turned away. “And it wasn’t all a lie. Not all of it. Your father was—is—a very powerful man.”

Dea ignored that part. More lies, probably, to make her feel better. “Oh yeah?” She crossed her mind. “So who is he? Some big shot lawyer? Some random guy you screwed?”

“Odea Donahue.” Her mom’s voice got very quiet. Dea knew she had gone too far, but she couldn’t stop.

“I don’t even know my real last name. Maybe Brody Dawes was right about you,” she blurted out. “Maybe all those people in Arizona were right.”

Her mom flinched, as if Dea had reached out and slapped her. But it was too late to take the words back so Dea just stood there, breathing hard, fighting the desperate open-shut feeling in her chest, pressing down the guilt.

Her crush on Brody Dawes had ended when, halfway through sixth grade, she was shocked to hear Brody say her name. For a second, she nearly fainted from joy. Then she realized what he was saying. Donahue’s mom’s a whore. She gives it out in the parking lot of the Quick-E-Lube. No one could figure out how Dea’s mom was making her money that year—she’d been laid off at the insurance office—and the rumor had spread quickly. It was a small town.

Miriam opened her mouth, then closed it again. Her whole face was like a scar: pinched and white. “Go to your room,” she said, forcing the words out. Dea was grateful for the excuse. She couldn’t stand to look at her mom anymore.

Upstairs, Dea tried once again to slam the door, to make a big statement, but the house was old and its joints swollen and instead she had to lean into the door just to get it to close. Toby looked up, blinking, from his position right in the middle of her pillow.

She lay down on the bed and let herself cry, feeling sorry for herself about everything, even the fact that Toby didn’t move or lick her face, and instead just sat there purring like a motor on her pillow.

Practically, she knew it changed nothing. She’d never had a dad. But at least she’d been able to pretend. She had studied his image and cut-and-pasted it into memories so he was there, in the background, watching her tootle along on her three-wheeler in a cul-de-sac in Georgia; beaming from the front row when she won a spelling bee in second grade in Virginia; nodding with approval while she flew down a soccer field in New Jersey, the one and only time she had been stupid enough to join a sports team. She’d been Photoshopping her past, tweaking it, aligning it just a little more closely with normalcy.

Why would her mom lie—why would her mom spend years lying—unless her real father was horrible, a criminal or a drug addict or someone who trafficked kiddie porn? Unless Miriam didn’t know herself. Dea had never seen her mom with a guy except for in Georgia, but that didn’t mean anything. She remembered plenty of nights she’d woken, thinking she heard the muffled sound of the front door closing, as though her mom had been out and just reentered. And her mom spent hours out of the house every day, working shit jobs, and would still show up sometimes with wads of cash, take Dea on a shopping spree to the local mall, spend three, four hundred bucks, like it was nothing.

She felt cold and her head hurt, as it always did when she cried, like she’d somehow snotted out her brains. She shook her bag out on her comforter—bad idea, it was full of old coins and petrified pieces of gum, lint balls and crumpled receipts and, mysteriously, some sand—looking for a pack of tissues her mom always stole from drug stores while they were waiting to pay. (That was another thing about Miriam—Dea didn’t feel like thinking of her as Mom anymore—she stole. Stupid things, little things, but still.)

Connor’s iPhone had somehow ended up in her bag. She must have grabbed it and shoved it automatically into her bag when they’d stopped at the rummage sale. She reached for it slowly, as if it were a grasshopper that might bound away if startled. Phones made great doors. Pictures, texts, music—all of it was personal. Using his phone to walk would be like opening up his brain.

She knew she should go over to his house right away to return it, but she also knew she wouldn’t be able to face him. Not yet. For the first time, she realized how shitty she’d been to him on the drive home. He was the first person who’d been nice to her in forever, and she’d totally screwed it up.

She swept the junk from her bed back into her bag, slapping the comforter to shake off some of the dirt. She shoved Toby over and he got up, yawning, before settling down again six inches from where he’d last been sitting. Then she turned off the lights and got under the covers, shorts and T-shirt and bra still on, not even bothering to wash her face or brush her teeth. She couldn’t face going out into the hall, in case her mom decided to come upstairs. And she definitely wasn’t going to eat dinner, even though she was starving. She hadn’t eaten anything since the milkshake at the Railroad Diner in DeWitt.

Instead she lay in the dark, clutching Connor’s iPhone, imagining it was a line that tethered her to him. She must have lain there in the darkness for at least an hour before she felt it—a softening of the boundaries of her body, and an opening, as though her bed had become a hole and she was dropping, or she was the hole and the world was dropping toward her. For a moment that could have been seconds or minutes or longer, she felt nothing but swinging, as if she wasn’t a person any longer but just sensation and vertigo. This was the in-between space, an awful space, untouched by thought, where nothing could exist. From the time she had started walking she had been terrified that one day she would get stuck here.

Then there was a parting, as of a curtain, and Dea felt a soft sucking pressure on her skin and suddenly she had skin again, and ribs and lungs expanding inside of them. She came out of the dark like surfacing after being underwater and she was in. She’d made it.

She was in Connor’s dream.

She was standing in an empty apartment. She recognized it right away as a hastily constructed overstructure, not an element of the dream, exactly, but Connor’s instinctive response to her intrusion. The details weren’t filled in. The furniture was missing, and there were soft petals of plaster drifting from the ceiling, as though the whole place were in danger of collapse. The windows were missing, too, although as she approached, panes grew up out of the empty sills; the glass knitted itself together elegantly, like ice forming over a pond. He was trying to keep her out.