I found him at three a.m. A team baseball photo. He was darker. He wore pinstripes. He leaned on a bat. He smiled an open smile I hadn’t seen before. He was blurry, his features undefined, but I could see the blue of his eyes. It was him. I looked at the source. San Diego Gazette, three years ago. The headline, “Shelton Oaks Wins the Championship.”

I closed my eyes and flashed back to the first time I saw Troy in the library. How I asked whether he knew about comas. I remembered what Janna said about printing the names of minors in the paper, so I tried a new search. “San Diego, Shelton Oaks, coma.”

There was only one link, and it was over two years old. FAMILY FOUND IN DITCH. I almost couldn’t bring myself to click on it.

47-year-old Jay Varga and his wife, Nancy, 46, were found dead in their car off of Hutton Road yesterday afternoon. Their daughter, Sharon, 21, was pronounced dead at the hospital from massive blood loss. They were reported missing earlier in the day when their son, a junior at Shelton Oaks, failed to show up for school for the third consecutive day and attempts to reach the family were unsuccessful. The son remains in a coma.

With shaking hands, I reached into my desk drawer and pulled out the scrap of paper with Troy’s number. I dialed. It rang four times before Troy’s gravelly voice answered. “Hello?” Why had I called? What would I say? “Hello? Anyone there? Delaney?” I slammed the phone down hard.

I was wrong. We weren’t anything greater. We had been damaged. Fragmented. Something less. Strip the brain bare, down to its primitive form. This is what remains.

I never did get to sleep that night. All I could think about was death. The smell of smoke. The color of flames. The burn throbbing in the center of my hand. And a cane on fire. In my memory, it bubbled like flesh.

I didn’t see Decker Saturday morning. His car was there and then it was gone and then it was there, but I never saw him. He didn’t call. To be fair, I didn’t call him either.

I couldn’t stand to be in my room anymore. I couldn’t look at my computer without thinking about Troy and his dead family and him living alone in that crappy apartment. I couldn’t look at all the ribbons on my walls without thinking how pointless it all was. And that stupid book, Les Misérables, lay on my desk untouched, stuck on page forty-three. A painfully obvious metaphor for everything about me and Decker. Our relationship: abandoned. Our friendship: broken, like the spine. Everything wrong.

I walked down to the kitchen. “Can I borrow your car?” Mom tensed over the sink. The water continued dripping and water overflowed from the cups.

“The roads are still icy,” she said to the drain, “and you haven’t driven in a while. And with your ribs, your range of motion may be decreased.”

I twisted gently back and forth, but she wasn’t looking. “Want me to do a back bend?” Not that I could. Actually, I was probably fine as long as I didn’t do a back bend.

She placed her hands on opposite sides of the sink and looked upward. “I want you to live.”

“I am. Look, I’ll be really careful. I’ll drive under the speed limit. Promise I won’t die.”

Mom turned to look at me, her face pale, her worry lines pronounced. “I’m not sure which way will guarantee I won’t lose you. Overbearing or underbearing.”

“That’s not a word,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.

“My father,” she began. She cleared her throat and started again. “My father was overbearing. That’s what your dad is worried about.” She looked out the side window. “But my mother, she was underbearing. She didn’t care. And that was worse.” She ran her hand along the edge of the countertop.

“Mom—” I tried to stop her because it turned out I didn’t really want to know. I didn’t want to hear it.

“Your dad thinks I left home because of my father. He was awful, it’s true. He’d lose it over the smallest thing—the way I emptied the dishwasher, the way I left clothes hanging over the end of the hamper, anything. It was hell.” I looked around the kitchen, so perfect, so orderly, and saw something else besides cleanliness. Compulsion. Fear. She continued, “But that’s not why I left. It was my mother. She watched, she did nothing, she didn’t defend me, she didn’t take me and leave. She was just complicit. And that was far, far worse.”

We didn’t speak for a long time, just listened to the water collect in the sink and escape down the drain in spurts.

“Maybe you should aim for something in between.”