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LEX: I hate you for making me feel this stupid.

I hit send. I stood there with my chest heaving. I waited, absurdly, for the three little dots to come up, for the apology, for the sideways smile.

Nothing.

I turned the phone off and put it in my pocket, and walked back to the house through the dusk with my hands in fists and a roaring in my ears, and every window in the manor lit gold and warm and safe.

I ate dinner.

I want that noted. I sat at my mother’s table, and I ate her pot roast and her carrots, and I said “yes, sir” to my father when he came in at eight-thirty and asked about the quarterly. I complimented Jenny’s new haircut. I laughed at my mother’s story about the plumber. I made polite noises. I was a model of a son.

Inside, I was coming apart.

That was Sunday.

By Wednesday I had run out of things to break. I did the north loop and the south loop. I organized my father’s garage. I let Jenny drag me to a coffee shop where I met Tyler, who turned out to be a skinny kid with kind eyes and a ukulele case who cried when I looked at him, and I liked him, and I told him I’d kill him if he ever made her cry, and he said “That’s fair.” The girl at the café had been his cousin from Halifax. Jenny hugged me so hard my shoulder popped. I called Jason and told him I was fine four times. Every night I lay in the narrow bed with my phone turned off. Every morning I turned it on and there was nothing.

There was no text, no call, and not one sideways smile.

On the fourth night I went to bed early. I lay in the narrow bed with the lights off and listened to the house settle. Somewhere below, a clock struck ten, then eleven. My father’s study light went off. My mother’s door clicked shut. I lay flat on my back and stared at the ceiling and felt a thousand hot, grinding, ugly things move around inside me, and I did what I always do.

I got up.

I put on black jeans, black boots, a black hoodie. I took my father’s spare card from the drawer where I had known for ten years it was kept, a black-and-silver card, heavy as a coin, that opened doors I would rather have left shut.

I paused at the door of my sister’s room.

She was asleep, curled up around a stuffed rabbit she’d owned since she was three, her braids spilled across the pillow. The moon lit her face. She looked exactly as she had when she was five. I stood there for a long time with my hand on the doorframe.

Don’t, said a small quiet voice. Don’t go.

It sounded a lot like Maksim.

I went.

I got the bike from the garage, an old Kawasaki of my father’s that no one had touched in years, and wheeled it to the end of the drive without starting it so as not to wake the house. At the gate I turned to look back once, at the gray stone and the gold windows and a single light burning in a top-floor bedroom, my mother’s, where she was reading.

I put on my helmet, and drove off into the dark, toward the one place in the city where nobody would ask me how I was.

It’s called the Pit.

It has no sign, either.

PART FOUR

THE HUNT

Chapter 26

MAKSIM

Fifty Words

Iwrote it forty-one times.

I want that on the record, because Sabine has told the story since, at every dinner where she can find an audience, and she has exaggerated it to sixty. It was forty-one. I wrote it on the plane, in the seat by the window, with a cup of black coffee gone cold at my elbow and a phone on which I had disabled every function but one. I wrote it in English and deleted it, and I wrote it in Russian and deleted it, and I wrote it as a poem, God forgive me, and deleted it at once and looked around to see whether anyone had seen.

The version I sent was fifty words. I counted them. Fifty is not a large number. It is not enough to hold a man’s whole life, or his fear, or the fact that the address of his mother’s house had been marked with a red pin on a map in a dead woman’s shrine. I had fifty. I used them badly.