And she did imagine. A lot. That he’d been a firefighter who’d perished heroically during 9/11. That he worked for the CIA and had been captured during a dangerous mission, but would someday reappear, having escaped from prison using only a pair of tweezers. That he’d been framed for a crime he didn’t commit and would remain hidden until he could clear his name.

Anything but the suspicion that crept up on her sometimes, surprised her when she wasn’t paying attention: that he’d simply gotten tired of them, and walked out.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Dea asked. She knew that her mom went as long as she could between walks, until she was so sick she could barely stand.

“I’m positive. Let me do the worrying, Dea.” Her mom finished pouring the coffee, and added exactly three seconds’ worth of milk. “Coffee?”

“In a minute.” She sat down at the table and reached absentmindedly for the newspaper, which trumpeted headlines about record heat and a murder all the way down in Aragansett County. She felt good. It was Saturday and sunny and she had forty-eight hours before she had to be back in school.

“I was reading that,” her mom said quickly, moving to stop her.

It was too late. Several real estate brochures slipped out from between the folds of the paper. Each of them featured nearly identical pictures of happy-ever-after-type families: Greenville, North Carolina. Tullahoma, Tennessee. St. Paul, Minnesota.

Dea’s whole body went cold. “What is this?” Dea pushed back from the table, as if the brochures might come alive and bite her. “What are these?”

Dea’s mother was stirring her coffee. She didn’t look up. “There’s no need to shout, Dea,” she said. “I’m just looking.”

“You said no more moving.” Dea’s stomach rolled into her throat. The blond-haired teenage boy on the cover of St. Paul, Minnesota, smirked at her.

“You don’t even like it here,” her mom said.

“I won’t like it there, either,” Dea said. It was the same everywhere; she knew that by now. New kids, same old rumors. At least here she had Gollum. Weirdly, the new boy’s face flashed in her mind—the way it had transformed when he smiled. “I mean, come on. Minnesota?”

“I said, I’m just looking.” Finally, Dea’s mom looked up. Her eyes were signaling a warning. But Dea didn’t care.

“You promised,” she said. She stood up, feeling shaky. “You absolutely swore—”

“Things change.” Miriam cut Dea off, slamming her coffee cup down on the counter, so a little liquid sloshed over the rim. They stood in silence, glaring at each other. Then she sighed. “Listen, Dea,” she said. “Nothing’s certain yet, okay? It’s all preliminary.”

“I won’t do it,” Dea said. “You can’t make me.”

“Of course I can,” Miriam said, frowning a little. “There are things you don’t understand, Dea. Things much too complicated for you to—”

There was a sharp knock on the front door. Miriam jumped; Dea, too. Toby began to yowl. No one ever came to the front door, except for the Domino’s guy and sometimes a Jesus freak pushing repentance and offering to sell a bible for $3.99. Gollum and Dea met every morning at the gate, and said good-bye every afternoon there too.

“Who is that?” Miriam looked almost afraid. She quickly shuffled the brochures back under the newspaper, as if they were evidence of a crime. Which, to Dea, they were. “You’re not expecting anyone, are you?”

Dea didn’t bother to answer. She was still furious.

Toby followed her down the hall. She pinned him against the wall with a foot so he wouldn’t run out, and then unlocked all three locks. She hadn’t bothered to look out the window. She knew it would be a Bible thumper.

But it was Connor.

“Hi.” He lifted a hand and waved, even though they were standing only about a foot away from each other.

Dea was so shocked that for a moment, she nearly said go away, which is what she would have said to a Bible guy. Toby wiggled away from her and darted out onto the porch. Connor bent down and grabbed hold of him.

“Not so fast, little guy,” he said.

“Thanks,” Dea said, when Connor passed Toby back, holding him delicately, as if Toby might shatter. When she turned around to place him back in the house, she saw a quick movement down the hall: her mother, retreating into the kitchen. Dea stepped out onto the porch, closing the door, so her mother couldn’t stand there and gape—so Connor wouldn’t accidentally get a view of a dozen clocks and the faded silhouettes of mirrors removed from the wall, too.

“What do you want?” she said, which sounded rude, but it was too late to take it back.

“Happy Saturday to you, too,” Connor said, but nicely, as a joke. Dea thought he was expecting her to say something but didn’t know what. “Um . . . can I come in?”

“No,” she said. She wished suddenly she’d paid more attention to her outfit. She was wearing flip-flops, ragged cut-off shorts that revealed the paleness of her legs and the smattering of freckles on her thighs, and a faded blue T-shirt with a Mr. Clean logo stretching directly across her boobs. She hadn’t even brushed her teeth. “So what’s up?” She crossed her arms and tried not to breathe too hard.

Connor smiled wide. She wondered whether his smile was like a negotiation technique, to get people to say yes to him. She wondered whether it worked with other girls. “I thought you might want to hang out,” he said easily. “Give me a tour. Show me the Fielding sights.”

“Trust me,” she said. “There’s nothing to see.”

He shrugged. “I thought you might want to hang out anyway.”

For a split second, Dea felt as if she must still be walking a dream. Boys like Connor—good-looking, sporty, prom-court kind of boys—weren’t nice to girls like Dea. It was a fundamental rule of nature, the same way that panthers didn’t get chummy with groundhogs unless they were hunting for their next meal. Any second Connor’s face would fracture and he’d turn into her math teacher. Or the scene would dissolve, and the front porch would turn into a rolling ocean, and Connor would disappear entirely.

But no. Connor was still there, on her porch, looking extra boy: old jeans and worn black Chucks and a band T-shirt, his hair a little messy, his smile a little crooked, definitely the cutest boy who had ever spoken to her or stood close enough that she could smell the fact that he was chewing gum.

“I don’t know anyone else,” he said, almost apologetically.

“What about your cousin?” she said.

He made a face. “I hate that guy. Always have. Do you know when we were kids he used to amputate frogs’ legs for fun?”

“That’s sick,” Dea said, although she wasn’t surprised. Last year, Will Briggs had shoved Carl Gormely into a gym locker and left him there for a whole day. The janitor finally let him out when he was making rounds after school and heard banging.

“Tell me about it.” Connor was looking at her with an expression she couldn’t decipher. “Come on. What do you say?”

She wondered, then, what kind of dreams he had. They were probably sun-drenched and happy, full of pinwheeling flowers and girls in bikinis and rivers of Coors Light. Normal dreams.

She half suspected this was some kind of trick. And she knew, definitely knew, that it couldn’t last.

But maybe, just for a day, it wouldn’t hurt to pretend.

“I’ll get the keys,” she said.

Dea’s first real crush was on a guy named Brody Dawes, back in Arizona. All the sixth-grade girls liked Brody. He was in eighth grade and had long sandy hair he was always sucking into his mouth, especially during tests. He skateboarded to school every day and carried around a dingy army-style backpack covered with patches for bands no one had ever heard of. When he wasn’t sucking on his hair or a pen cap, he was picking at one of the patches, looking bored. He always kept his backpack in his lap, like he was ready to make a quick exit.