He joked, “Is this some kind of test?”

“No.” She couldn’t do this to him. Not like this. Maybe not ever. “I was looking at the dates.” She shuffled through the forms to give herself something to do. “All the incidents happened within the last few weeks. Something must have set him off. Tommy didn’t have a temper until recently.”

“I’ll see what I can find.” He took back the pages and stacked them on the table. He was nervous, and he was not stupid. He had spent a lifetime looking for cues, searching for tells and ticks, so that he could keep his secret hidden.

Sara put her hand on his arm. “Will—”

He stood up, moving out of her reach. “Thank you, Dr. Linton.”

Sara stood, too. She fumbled for something to say. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help more.”

“You’ve been great.” He walked to the door and held it open for her. “Please thank your mother for her hospitality.”

Sara left before she was pushed out. She got to the bottom of the steps and turned around, but Will had already gone inside.

“Good Lord,” Sara mumbled as she walked across the wet grass. She’d actually managed to make Will feel more uncomfortable than her mother had.

The distant sound of a car came from up the road. Sara watched a police cruiser roll by. This time, the cop behind the wheel did not tip his hat at her. In fact, he seemed to glare at her.

Will had warned her this would happen, that the town would turn against her. Sara hadn’t thought the time would come so quickly. She laughed at herself, the circumstances, as she crossed the driveway and went into the house. Will might have trouble reading the words on a page, but he was pretty damn good at reading people.

CHAPTER EIGHT

JASON HOWELL PACED BACK AND FORTH ACROSS HIS TINY DORM room, the shuffling of his feet blending with the shushing of the rain outside his window. Papers were strewn across the floor. His desk was cluttered with open books and empty Red Bull cans. His ancient laptop made a sound like an exhausted sigh as it went to sleep. He needed to be working, but his brain was spinning in his head. Nothing could hold his attention for more than a few minutes—not the broken lamp on his desk or the emails flooding his inbox and certainly not the paper he was supposed to be working on.

Jason rested his palm just below the keyboard on the laptop. The plastic was hot to the touch. The fan that cooled the motherboard had started clicking a few weeks ago, around the same time he’d nearly gotten a third-degree burn on his legs from keeping the computer on his lap. He guessed there was something bad happening between the battery and the charger plugged into the wall. Even now there was a slight tinge of burning plastic in the air. Jason grabbed the plug but stopped short of yanking it out of the socket. He chewed the tip of his tongue as he stared at the snaking electrical cord in his hand. Did he want the machine to overheat? A dead laptop was a life-altering catastrophe. Maybe his work would be lost, his footnotes and research and the last year of his life melting into one giant lump of stinking plastic.

And then what?

He didn’t have any friends left. Everyone in the dorm avoided him when he walked down the hall. Nobody talked to him in class or asked to borrow his notes. He hadn’t been out for a drink in months. Except for his professors, Jason couldn’t recall one meaningful conversation he’d had with anyone since before Easter break.

Anyone but Allison, but that didn’t count. They weren’t really talking lately. All they did was end up screaming at each other about the stupidest things—who was supposed to order the pizza, who forgot to shut the door. Even the sex was bad. Confrontational. Mechanical. Disappointing.

Jason couldn’t blame Allison if she hated him right now. He couldn’t do anything right. His paper was a mess. His grades had started to slip. He was running out of money from his grandfather’s trust. Papa had left him twelve thousand dollars to supplement Jason’s scholarships and loans for school. At the time, the number had seemed enormous. Now that Jason was a year into his graduate program, it seemed like a pittance. And that pittance was getting smaller every day.

No wonder he was so depressed he barely had the strength to raise his head.

What he really wanted was Allison. No, scratch that—he wanted the Allison he had known for one year and eleven months. The one who smiled when she saw him. The one who didn’t burst into tears every five minutes and yell at him for being a bastard when Jason asked her why she was sad.

“Because of you,” she would say, and who wanted to hear that? Who wanted to be blamed for somebody else’s misery when you were knee-deep in your own?

And Jason was miserable. It radiated off him like the heat lamp over the french fries at McDonald’s. He’d lost track of the last time he’d showered. He couldn’t sleep. Nothing could make his brain shut down long enough for rest. As soon as he lay down, his eyelids started going up and down like a lazy yo-yo. Darkness tended to bring it all fresh into his mind, and before long that monster weight of loneliness started pressing on his chest so that he felt like he couldn’t breathe.

Not that Allison cared. He could be dead right now for all she knew. He hadn’t seen another human being since the dorm cleared out for Thanksgiving break three days ago. Even the library had closed early on Sunday, the last stragglers clawing at the steps as the staff finally locked the doors. Jason had watched them go from his window, wondering if they were going to be alone, if they had anyone to spend their holiday with.

Except for the constant hum of the Cartoon Network and Jason’s occasional mumblings to himself, the place was completely silent. Even the janitor hadn’t shown his face in days. Jason probably wasn’t supposed to be in the building. The heat had been turned off when the last students left. He was sleeping in his warmest clothes, holed up under his winter coat. And the one person who was supposed to care about this evidently didn’t give a shit.

Allison Spooner. How had he fallen in love with a girl who had such a stupid name?

She had called him like crazy for days, and then yesterday—nothing. Jason had watched his phone light up each time with her caller ID and each time he hadn’t answered it. Her messages were all the same: “Hey, call me.” Would it kill her to say something else? Would it kill her to say that she missed him? He had conversations in his head where he asked her these questions and she said, “You know what? You’re right. I should be a better girlfriend.”

Conversations. More like fantasies.

For three days, all the phone did was ring. He started to worry that Allison’s caller ID would get etched into the screen on his phone. He’d watched the bars for the battery indicator disappear one by one. With each bar, he told himself he would answer the phone if she called before the next one disappeared. Then it would blink off with no call and he’d say the next one. Then the next one. Finally, the phone had turned itself off while he was sleeping. Jason had panicked as he searched for the charger. He’d plugged it into the wall and—nothing.

Her silence was loud and clear. You didn’t give up on somebody like that if you loved them. You kept calling. You left messages that said something more deep and personal than “Hey, call me.” You apologized. You didn’t send a stupid IM every twenty minutes saying “where r u?” You banged on their door and yelled at the top of your lungs for them to please, please see you.