After an eternity, he shut down the projector and we were free. Jenny picked her way around knees and backpacks to stand by my seat. “How’s Cora?”

“Much better. Talking, awake. I think she’s through the worst of it.”

“I’m taking her shifts, so I haven’t had a minute free to go over there again. You going now?”

“Probably not until late. Her parents are there.”

She moved aside to let another student by. “I bet that’s going just grand.”

“They haven’t had me arrested. I’d say that’s a win.” I stood up, slinging my backpack over my shoulder. “You’ve talked to her boss, right?”

“Yeah, they’re supposedly sending her a care package. Probably leftover coffee and stale strudel.” Jenny fell into step beside me. “Why do you think she walked into the water? I mean, I knew she’d been upset, and this was big shit going down, but that’s huge. She’s no drama queen, and trust me, I know drama.”

I’m sure she did. But I had no answer for her. Corabelle was different now, parts of her as unreachable as the shadows on the moon. We headed for the stairs. “I’m betting the hospital is going to try and drag it out of her,” I said.

“You think they’ll say she’s crazy or something?”

“She’s putting on a pretty good act of being normal.”

Jenny rushed to keep up with me, her pink ponytail swinging. “Are we talking about the same person? Because the Corabelle I know couldn’t fool a kindergartner.”

Our footsteps echoed in the stairwell, and I had to resist the urge to pause on the spot where Corabelle and I talked for the first time after discovering we were on the same campus. “She’ll rise to the occasion.”

“Well, fooling the shrinks is all well and good, but both you and I know the real deal. She went into the ocean and wasn’t planning on coming back out.”

I stopped on the bottom step and turned to face Jenny. “Look, we don’t know what Corabelle was thinking, and we don’t know she has a problem. She’s working it out now, and she’ll either fool the social worker or she won’t. I don’t think she’s in any danger, and I would rather us be supportive than speculate.”

Jenny held her hands in the air. “Whoa, dish boy’s got a burr up his ass.”

I whirled back around at that. This conversation was pointless.

“Hey, Gavin, sorry.” She grabbed my arm. “You know I want what’s best for her. That was a tough scene out there.”

I yanked the door open. “Why the hell did you meet me there anyway? Why not any other place?”

Jenny halted. “That’s a very good question. It’s what she wanted.” She twirled a pink lock around her finger. “You think she planned it? That doesn’t seem like her.”

I shook my head. “No. She’s sentimental. We had some moments on the beach, that’s all.”

Jenny passed through the door. “I’m sure you’re right. But even if she does escape the sanity police, we should keep an eye on her.”

“I plan to,” I said. “Once she’s discharged, I’m not letting her out of my sight.”

I only managed to work a half-shift at the garage before Bud sent me home again. I was too distracted and sheared off a radiator hose on a routine maintenance job.

I stopped by Corabelle’s apartment to look around before heading to the hospital and facing her parents. They had probably been there all day, and I hoped they’d be ready to leave, if not already gone, before I arrived.

The butterflies I re-created from Finn’s crib mobile still hung in the trees outside her door, although a little more sparse than I had originally laid out. A few lay on the ground and I scooped them up.

Her apartment was stuffy and airless. I left the door open to let the cool inside and sat on her sofa, remembering how tense I’d been that first time I came over, when she’d asked for me.

Why had she texted me that night? There were so many things about her I didn’t know, places she’d been that I’d never go or understand.

I caught a whiff of something foul and moved to the kitchen, pulling the trash bag from the bin. I spotted a plate I remembered from our apartment, a ceramic fish painted by a neighbor. I set the bag down and picked up the plate. Corabelle wouldn’t serve fish on it, saying it was cannibalistic somehow, but I could picture cookies stacked on it, and orderly rows of crackers and squares of cheese from when someone came over to study.

I wondered what else she had, flipping open a few cabinets. I left every single thing behind, all my clothes, my toothbrush, everything I owned except my laptop and backpack, which had been in my car when I took off from the funeral. I had started over literally from scratch, but Corabelle had retained the detritus of our lives together.

I couldn’t find anything interesting, so I picked up the trash bag again, jumping back when a wet drop hit my shoe. A green liquid oozed from several holes in the bottom of the sack. Cheap bags. I opened her pantry and searched for a box of them to double bag it so I didn’t leave a trail through her apartment. I found a neatly folded stack of them, and tugged the first one off the top, snapping it open.

As the sack fitted over the other, I realized it, too, had holes. What was that all about? I examined them, realizing they were perfect punctures, done on purpose. I returned to the pantry and pulled another one from the stack. Also riddled with them. Every bag had been tampered with.

Attached to the door was one of those stick-on closet organizers designed to hold plastic grocery bags to be reused. It was stuffed full of sacks. I pulled one out and held it up to the overhead light.

Holes.

I pulled out bag after bag, and they were all the same. Careful punctures at the bottom of each one.

What was Corabelle doing? She didn’t have a cat to get tangled in one and suffocate. Obviously she didn’t have a child. And either way, it was an obsessive thing to do.

I stuffed the sacks back in the little bin and folded the trash bags as best I could. I wiped up the floor with paper towels and held the bag sideways to keep the worst of it from dripping.

As I walked around the building looking for the dumpster, I decided to put this from my mind for now. Corabelle could tell me about it later, when she was stronger, when we had some miles under our belt and could talk about hard stuff. Whatever was going on with her, and whatever quirks came out of it, probably led back to me. If I wanted us to be together again, I had to accept all the things about her. So I would.

My parents were going to drive me crazy. They’d sat around my bed all day, talking about the most inane things. Knitting. Football. Construction in my hometown.

“You guys are in one of the most beautiful cities in California,” I said. “Go out and see the sights.”

Mom shook her head. “While you are still recovering? Of course not.”

Every time the door opened, my anxiety rose that the social worker would return and my parents would want to stick around for the interrogation. They had no clue that I’d been kicked out of New Mexico State, only that I had decided to finish out my degree at the school I had originally applied to. They also didn’t know I had forfeited my scholarships and was going into debt.

But Miss Cat-Eye Glasses probably knew all of that.

I poked at the new phone Dad had brought, wishing my old one would turn on so that I could at least get a contact list. Neither Jenny nor Gavin had called or texted me, both thinking mine was still defunct. I vowed to memorize their numbers from now on, so I’d never be out of contact again. I felt cut off from the world.

“I’m surprised Gavin hasn’t tried to connive his way back to your room today,” Dad said. “I’m looking forward to kicking him out. I already talked to the staff and they said if he isn’t family, he can be asked to leave.”