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Blackwell’s was a popular steak house situated in downtown Greenwich. The tables were capped in white, fluttering cloth, the walls a lovely exposed brick. The menu rotated daily, based solely on the chef’s changing whims. It was the sort of place one went for aesthetic, not for appetite.

Everyone in the extravagant dining room was dressed for either business or pleasure. New Yorkers in tailored suits and beetle-bright brogues conducted expensive conversations over expensive meals. Couples in their designer best sat side by side, lost in a world of their own and splitting vintage bottles of wine. Vivienne felt odd and out of sorts, her dress ill fitting, her bones disjointed, her skin coming loose.

She was certain everyone could see it.

She’d spent the night slumped against her bedroom door, listening to the sound of Thomas breathing on the other side. In the shattered glass of her vanity mirror, a dozen black eyes peered out at her, cold with triumph. She hadn’t slept. Not a wink.

Now she poked at her beet salad and did her best to look alert.

“He’s not really blending in,” said Hudson, helping himself to another generous pour of merlot. “Is he?”

Vivienne smiled and shrugged, ignoring the hard wall of Thomas’s stare as she leaned in to take a bite of lettuce. He did look extremely out of place, dressed in a gray sleeveless hoodie and running shorts, his tattoo scrawled along his forearm and a cowlick rising from the mess of his hair. Directly across from her, Hudson was his stark opposition in a gray crosshatch suit. He looked every bit a trust-fund princeling, his dark curls cut into a fade and the top three buttons of his dress shirt artfully undone.

Hudson’s father worked as an anesthesiologist for Shetland Health. Hudson and Vivienne had known each other since infancy—enrolled in the same overpriced daycares and then shipped off to the same stuffy schools. They’d never been friends, per se, but Vivienne hadn’t called him here today because she needed a friend.

She needed an anesthetic.

She slid her phone across the table, taking a sip of Riesling as she did. Her demands were all typed up in notes, directly copied from the list of supplies Jesse had grudgingly emailed her just the day before. She swirled the contents of her glass as Hudson read them over, cutting intermittent glances toward Thomas. He stood at the bar, looking entirely out of his element as he bargained with the hostess.

Vivienne watched the scene unfold with slow-climbing glee, waiting for the inevitable moment when he’d be kicked out. Instead, her hopes were dashed as he braced a forearm against the bar and leaned in, whispering something into the hostess’s ear. Color crawled into the girl’s face in a blush. Throwing her head back, she laughed an open, pretty laugh—the kind of sound Vivienne hadn’t made in years. Not without drawing blood. She watched, irritation cutting into her, as the hostess jotted something onto a cocktail napkin and handed it to Thomas.

When he looked up, it was right at her, as though he’d known all along she’d been watching him. His self-satisfied smirk turned her frustration to a whipsaw.

I’ll be right back , she signed to Hudson, who was still reading the message on her phone.

By the time she stormed the bar, Thomas’s smile was gone. In its place was an expression that was so perfectly solemn he might have been a monk. She tore the cocktail napkin out of his hands and peered down at it. A phone number scrawled across the front in neat bubble numbers. Something white-hot and indefinable sparkled through her blood.

“Tough to interpret from over here,” noted Thomas mildly.

Vivienne ripped the napkin in half one way. She ripped it the other. He leaned back with the patience of a saint, reaching for his drink. Before he could so much as raise it to his lips, she’d shoved the napkin neatly inside the glass. Seltzer water sopped into the paper, leaving a pale, pulpy skin on the ice. For several seconds, the two of them stared down into his cup.

“Your date is looking for you,” said Thomas.

Sure enough, Hudson had hooked his arm over the back of his chair and was staring at them with increasing interest. Edging past Thomas the way she would a bug, Vivienne stalked back to their table and dropped into her seat. If Hudson had an opinion, he kept it to himself, sliding her phone back over to her.

“I don’t know about all this, Viv. I could get in huge trouble.”

She glowered. Hudson didn’t sign—at least not fluently—and so they were reduced to a purely textual relationship. It was an arrangement that usually benefited both of them, but she hadn’t wanted to have this particular conversation over text. Not since Reed had told her about Thomas snooping through her phone. She fished through her bag and pried out a notecard and pen, jotting down the exact dosage Jesse had given her and sliding it across the table.

Hudson’s eyes went wide. “And you’re not even going to tell me what you need this for?”

She shook her head.

“Figures.” He lifted his wine and stared into it before setting it back down without taking a sip. “Lie to me, at least. Is it for a prank? A party? Is it part of a game?”

Vivienne only stared solemnly across the table at him, waiting him out.

The minutes crawled past, flooded with the clink of cutlery, snatches of conversation. Several tables behind them, someone laughed. In the end, Hudson caved first. He always did. It was the opportunist in him. He could never resist a bargain. Tipping back his chair, he let out a bone-weary groan that Vivienne knew was all for show.

“Fine. I want Reed Connolly.”

Vivienne tugged the notepad back to her, conscious of Thomas watching their every move.

What for , she wrote.

“You know exactly what for,” he said, before she’d even finished dotting her question mark. “My parents’ yearly charity gala is coming up. I don’t plan on going without a date. You get me Reed, talk that goth into wearing a suit for once, and I get you your anesthetic with no questions asked.”

She picked up her pen to scribble out a retort, but he held up a hand to stop her.

“Those are my terms. You scratch my back, I scratch yours.”

Reed is a delinquent , she jotted, her loops all coming loose. Your parents will hate him.

Hudson grinned. “Why do you think I want him?”

His voice winnowed strangely, as though someone had turned the volume as low as it could go. She glanced up, startled, and looked around to see if anyone else had noticed. Hudson was reaching for his wine, still grinning over at her. Thomas stood watching them from the bar. The rest of the restaurant carried out their muffled conversations, oblivious to the way the sound wobbled and skewed.

At the adjacent table, someone was watching her. There’d been a pair of businessmen there just before—both dressed in summer suits and sporting expensive timepieces. In their place sat a single bloated figure. He peered at her out of unseeing eyes, one side of his face thatched in barnacles. His lips were infection dark. A seeping putrefaction pocked his skin.

She knew him. She’d know him anywhere.

He’d driven her to school. He’d sat through her recitals. He’d held her when she cried.

“It is not so bad,” said Mikhail Popov. “You don’t need to be afraid.”

She lurched to her feet, sending cutlery flying. Several heads turned toward her.

“Viv?” Hudson glanced at the table. Mikhail stared back, as cold and immutable as he’d been in life. “You okay?”

“He does not want to hurt you,” said Mikhail. His voice was wet, like he was full to the brim with water from the Sound. “He only wants you to come back home.”

Ice began to crackle over the windows, feathering the glass. Her breath plumed before her. Somewhere out of sight, there came the thready trickle of water. Hudson was speaking again, rising out of his chair to meet her. His voice was thin and distant.

Bathroom , she signed, snatching her bag off the back of her chair. She shoved into the aisle, the cold creeping into her skin, mist snaking around her ankles. At the bar, Thomas was already halfway off his stool.

Bathroom , she signed again. Then, as though he were a dog, she added, Sit.

He didn’t sit, but he didn’t follow her, either. Instead, he watched, his pale eyes flitting from Hudson and back to her as he tried, without success, to piece together what possibly could have happened.

Inside the bathroom, she collapsed against the door until it fell shut with a click. Under the yellow flush of lights, her reflection was pale as a wraith. She didn’t make eye contact as she turned on the water, splashing ice-cold droplets onto her neck.

When at last she glanced up, it was to find Mikhail standing just over her shoulder. She yelped, toppling into the hand dryer.

“He’s been searching for you.” His voice gurgled horribly. “Why do you hide yourself away? Don’t you want to be with the others?”

She scrabbled backward, slamming hard into the adjacent wall. The body—because she couldn’t think of it as Mikhail—stood between her and the door, blocking her exit. In the sink, the water ran without end. It poured over the edges, sluicing out onto the floor.

The corpse’s smile was silt dark. Seawater dribbled down its chin like slaver.

“It won’t be much longer,” it assured her. “Not now that He knows your name.”

The water rose fast—too fast—lapping at her ankles, her calves, the hem of her skirt. She rose with it, scrabbling desperately for a handhold, treading the surface until only a thin pocket of air remained at the ceiling. She was in a veritable tank, a forest of kelp weaving itself into impossible knots around her legs.

This was a nightmare. A hallucination.

It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real.

She took a final swallow of air just as the water engulfed her whole. Submerged, she sank like a stone. A sourceless light pierced the water in broad, crepuscular rays. It illuminated the muddy bottom, where a boy lay spread like a thin, dark crucifix. Beside him was a tiny pile of bones, phosphate black. A little gray fiddler crab scuttled along the bend of a rib. As she sank nearer, the boy opened his eyes and looked directly at her.

“You learn to like the cold,” he said. “You’ll see.”

“Vivienne?”

The voice emanated from all around her, disembodied and familiar.

“Vivienne.”

The boy’s features distorted, his eyes sinking into the wide orbitals of his face. He sat bolt upright and grabbed hold of her chin. She thrashed against him, tangled in the ghostly shrouds of her skirt. It was no use. He didn’t relinquish his grasp. His grip was iron. His thumb dug hard into the hinge of her jaw, forcing open her mouth. Alkaline water poured down her throat, thick with silt, until she was choking on it.

“Where are you?” he demanded. “Where are you?”

She kicked and kicked, her lungs burning, stars bursting along her periphery.

“Vivienne!”

With an ice-water jolt, Vivienne found herself blinking in the yellow light of Blackwell’s bathroom. She was bone-dry and breathing hard, the floor beneath her empty of puddles. Thomas Walsh stood directly in front of her, cradling her jaw in his hands.

“You’re okay,” he said. “ Hey. Look at me. You’re okay.”

She raised her gaze to his, taking in his familiarity like a touchstone. His face was as solemn as she’d ever seen it. His thumb traced over her cheek in an absent caress.

“There you are.”

He said it with such profound relief that it cracked her clean open. She flinched out of his reach like an animal, skidding hard into the wall. The hands that had just been holding her so very carefully went up in compliance.

“Easy,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

She tried to envision how he must have found her. Clawing at her own throat. Choking on nothing. All alone in a public restroom, pantomiming her own demise.

The thought was mortifying beyond imagination.

It felt too awful to keep standing there in abject silence, weathering his scrutiny. She hated being scrutinized. Hated it. When she’d first stopped speaking, her mother and Philip had hired all sorts of doctors to poke at her and examine her. They put her in machines for hours on end, strapped to a table and shivering cold. They jabbed her with needles and lancets and finger pricks, until she became so tired of it, she resolved to make it stop.

She took to lying on the floor as though dead, eyes shut and arms askew, waiting for the maid to stumble upon her. Upsetting everyone just enough to leave her be.

A single tear escaped her lashes and rolled down her cheek, adding insult to injury.

“I used to have panic attacks,” Thomas said softly. “I don’t, uh—I don’t love small spaces. There was an incident when I was kid where—well, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I had nightmares, after. I’d wake up convinced I couldn’t move my arms, or that I couldn’t breathe. It got so bad for a while that my mom finally made me see a therapist. She was kind of a whack job. The psychiatrist, I mean. She wasn’t awful or anything, it’s just that she was a real hippie about stuff. She used to make me do breathing exercises to these nature mixtapes.”

The bathroom door flew unexpectedly open. Thomas caught it mid-swing, wedging it closed. “This one’s occupied.”

“This is a multiple-use restroom” came a woman’s indignant voice.

Thomas’s only response was to reach over and turn the lock in a punctuative click .

“I’m getting the manager,” said the woman, shriller than before.

“Go ahead,” called Thomas.

They listened to the angry bite of heels on hardwood as the woman departed.

“My point is,” Thomas said, “she taught me this grounding exercise. She’d make me count my fingers. If the count was off, I knew I was having some kind of nightmare. If they were all there, I was awake.”

She stared up at him, unsure where he was going.

“I know it doesn’t sound like much,” he added, “but I swear it helped. Here—hold up a fist.”

Reluctantly, she obeyed. He mimicked her, unfolding his pinkie.

“One,” he began, and nodded when she followed suit. “Good—now two. Three. Four. Five.”

Their hands hung flush between them. Thomas’s throat corded in a swallow. He seemed to have forgotten the lesson entirely. Slowly, Vivienne fit her hand to his. The sudden contact jarred him into looking right at her. That hunted look was back in his eyes. The one he’d given her that first morning by the fountain. She felt the heat of it in her toes.

He pushed his fingers into hers, guiding her off the wall with a tug. She teetered on her own two feet before him, their hands threaded tight, the floor beneath her solid as rock.

In that moment, she realized she wanted very badly for him to kiss her.

He didn’t, of course. He only gave her a feeble smile and said, “There. You’re wide-awake.”

A knock sounded at the door. They sprang apart as though electrocuted.

“Viv?” It wasn’t the manager, but Hudson. He sounded annoyed. “If you were planning to stick me with the bill, there’s more creative ways to do it.”

Vivienne squeezed past Thomas and undid the latch, tugging the door wide. Hudson stood with his forearm braced against the frame, his brow balanced on the backs of his long, elegant fingers. He straightened at the sight of them, flattening his lapels.

“Interesting. You know, some dates would find this offensive.”

Vivienne shot him a daggered glance and made her way back toward the dining room, where the lunch rush had just begun to clear. The businessmen had paid their bill and gone. No frost rimed the windows. No mist shrouded the floors. Narrowly dodging a passing waitress, Hudson fell into step alongside Vivienne. Thomas took up the rear, his hands in his pockets and his gaze walled off.

She couldn’t bring herself to look at him.

“I’m all in, by the way,” said Hudson as they pushed out of the restaurant and onto the covered alfresco terrace. “You come through at the gala, and I’ll get you what you need.”

Her heart gave an awful pinch. This was the plan. It had always been the plan. Everything was going her way. And yet, when she held out her hand for Hudson to shake, her fingers trembled. He folded her hand in his, leaning in to kiss her on the cheek.

Into her ear, he whispered, “Whatever stupid thing it is you’re doing, I sincerely hope you don’t get yourself killed.”