I went into my room and changed, noticing the handprint on my upper arm. I pulled at the skin to see if Troy’s fingerprints had made an impression. To see who he was. Because Decker had me working out a logic problem: how did Troy know I was like him even before I met him? How did he know me at all? First, I thought he’d seen me in the paper. Lie. Then, I thought he knew me from Mrs. Merkowitz’s yard. Lie. Now, it appeared he knew me from the hospital. Maybe Troy was seeing a doctor for his headaches after all. If he could lie so effortlessly to my parents, he could lie to me, too.

As I was working through that puzzle, another logic issue demanded attention. This had been my logic: people were dying, and we were drawn to them. People were dying, so we showed up. But what if it was the other way around? We showed up, and people died. Never had the order of sentence clauses seemed so important. Either I was drawn to death, which was eerie and kind of sucked, or I was causing death, which, let’s face it, was far, far worse.

I crumpled onto the floor and held my head in my hands, pressing my fingers into my temple. Something in there was wrong. Not a fluke or an anomaly and definitely not a miracle.

An abomination. And I had no one to talk to but Troy.

I wanted to borrow the car, but Mom wasn’t making breakfast when I got downstairs the next morning. She wasn’t scrubbing dishes either. Mom was nowhere to be found. I poked my head into the back office, the garage, and the laundry room. No Mom. I snuck back upstairs and stuck my nose into the open space of her doorway

The shades were pulled tight, and Mom was curled over old albums on the floor. I thought maybe she was looking back at her childhood, remembering, but I recognized the covers. They were the scrapbooks Mom had made of my childhood—a book per year, until grammar school, when everything started to blur together.

She was bent over, tracing the edge of a picture with her finger. Like she was trying to remember that girl. Like that girl in the picture was the real one and I was the ghost left behind. Like that girl in the picture was dead. No, not dead. Like my grandparents—dead to her. A chill ran through me, and I backed away.

I took the car.

Troy probably wouldn’t expect me this early. After I kicked him out yesterday afternoon, he might not expect me at all. He had scared me a little when I realized how intimidating he could be. How possessive. How angry.

The same woman was working at the front desk. She waved when I walked in and jutted her thumb out down the hall. And just like the last time I had been there, death was pulling at me from both sides of the hall. Some faint, some stronger. The strongest was at the end of the hall. Which was where I found Troy again. I leaned against the doorjamb and watched him care for the old woman. He used a wet washcloth to clean her face and placed it on her forehead while he cleared the food from her tray.

I had misjudged him. I couldn’t have done this. I couldn’t care for the elderly, the sick, or the dying. I had misunderstood. Sure, he could get angry, but so could I. I had let out my frustrations on Decker. And my own parents were scared of what I had become. They didn’t give me the benefit of the doubt, and that hurt worse than the burn on my hand. And Troy, he deserved to be believed even more than I did. How could someone with so much compassion be anything but good?

I raised my fist to the open door, about to knock, but then I froze. Troy had shaken a small cup of pills onto the woman’s tray and scattered them with his fingers. Blue, pink, white, yellow. He scooped three of them back up and gripped them in his fist. Only the yellow remained. I didn’t know him that well, after all. Maybe this was how he got his painkillers. Or maybe he had a drug problem. Maybe he sold them to pay for his apartment. But really, it could all be explained away by his situation. He wasn’t perfect. He was broken. A victim of circumstance.

Except then he walked to the sink and dropped the pills into the basin and turned on the faucet. He filled a paper cup with water as the pills washed down the drain. Then he turned back to the old woman, placed the yellow pill in her mouth, and let her sip from the small cup. I took another silent step forward, because even though I was completely perplexed, I was relieved he wasn’t stealing drugs.

But then he leaned in close to her ear and said, “You won’t suffer much more. Don’t worry, it won’t be long now,” and his words echoed in my head, bouncing around, tearing at my memories.

I stepped backward quickly, my shoes squeaking on the linoleum, and Troy whipped his head around. “Hi,” he said. “Did you just get here?”

I stepped further out of the room as an answer. “Shit,” he mumbled. “Wait,” he called as I ran down the hall. He caught up with me before I reached the front lobby and pulled me into an empty room. He closed the door behind me and leaned against it, barring my exit.