“What?” I asked her.

“It’s like . . . Well, maybe it’s like how the three of us can find each other,” she said. “He has her blood, and so now he can find her too.”

“How does that make sense?”

“Fuck, Iris. I don’t know. I don’t know what any of this means. I have no answers for you. I’m just throwing some thoughts out there, trying to get a brainstorming session rolling.”

“Okay, okay. God. What do we do now?”

“Keep moving, I guess.”

“Forever?”

“Until we can figure this thing out.”

“What is there to figure out?”

“How to kill a Minotaur? We’re humans, right? We’re, like, the dominant species for a reason. We’re terrifying. We have guns. We should easily be able to kill an upright cow.” Vivi stubbed out her cigarette. “I don’t have patience for this anymore,” she said as she stood and went inside. I heard her muttering to herself as she knelt by Grey’s side and slid a pillow under our sister’s head. “I want to go back to Budapest. I want to go back to drinking elderflower beer and making out with beautiful Hungarian women every night. Do you hear me? Wake up and sort out your mess. I like my life.”

I took a long inhale, then spotted Tyler at the end of the street, walking toward me with new sneakers on his feet and a Nike shoe box tucked under his arm. In his floral shirt and leopard print coat, he was an anachronism set against the cobbled road and stone houses.

“Nice kicks,” I said as he sank to the porch beside me. I offered him a banana and what was left of my coffee.

“Yes, well,” he said after taking a sip. “They’re not exactly my usual style, but they’d run out of lizard-skin Gucci loafers, so what’s a man to do?”

“I thought we might have seen the last of you.”

“I went to the train station and bought a ticket. I even got on the train and found my seat.”

“So why are you back here?”

“Oh, some kind of fire alarm went off and they evacuated all the passengers. I obviously wasn’t going to wait on the platform in the cold.”

“And here I was thinking you were suddenly struck by a moment of conscience.”

“God, no.” Tyler stretched out his long legs in front of him and tapped his new shoes together.

“I read about your sister.”

Tyler said nothing.

“If you don’t want to talk about her, I—”

“It’s fine. I just . . .” He scratched the bridge of his nose. “It happened a long time ago. I’m the youngest of four. The only boy. We were at a beach in the summer. I was five, Rosie was seven. We were good swimmers. We were daring each other to swim farther and farther out.” He recounted it like it was a Wikipedia article. It was the same way I talked about my abduction, if I had to. Removing the emotion and stating the bare-bones facts made it easier. “We got caught in a rip. We both went under. When they pulled me out, I had no heartbeat for three minutes. Eventually, they revived me. They couldn’t bring her back.”

“I know it’s not enough to say I’m sorry, but I’m sorry.”

Tyler had only 3 percent battery left on his phone, but he unlocked it and navigated to his Favorites folder in his photographs and showed her to me. Rosie. The little girl I’d seen in the news article, with long dark hair and a heavy fringe. There were pictures of her visiting family in Seoul. Pictures of her toothless grin on her first day of school. Pictures of her playing with her siblings: her two teenage sisters and Tyler. “Rosie was the bravest and most mischievous of the four of us. Always getting into trouble.”

“Sounds like Vivi.”

“Vivi reminds me of her, actually. Both full of attitude and incredibly annoying at times but endearing, somehow.” Tyler put his phone away. “Grey thinks I went there, you know.”

“Went where?”

“The Halfway. For the few minutes my heart stopped, that’s where she thinks I went.”

“Huh.”

“Huh, what? That was a very epiphanic huh.”

“Just that . . . Grey told me once that she thought you were special. I wonder if that’s why we can’t make you do whatever we want.” Tyler had died. Tyler had come back. Tyler was impervious to our compulsion. “I thought you thought this was all in my head?”

“Well, the way Grey talked about it—I mean, I assumed, like a normal person, that it was a fairy tale. I don’t remember much about that day, after I went into the water, but I do remember the smell of smoke when I came to on the beach. My mother told me—when I coughed up water from my lungs during the CPR, she thought she saw me coughing up flowers. I just never . . . It’s real, isn’t it? What’s happening is real.”

“Yeah. I think it is.”

“I bought you a gift,” he said. Tucked inside the Nike shoe box were three new iPhone chargers. Tyler handed me one. “One for you, one for me, one for your aggressively tattooed sister.”

“Thank you. That’s weirdly thoughtful.”

“People are always so surprised when I turn out to not be an absolute dick.”

“To be fair, you do seem to go out of your way to act like an absolute dick.”

“All part of my image, Little Hollow. Bad-boy swagger. I’m actually very deep.”

“I knew there had to be some reason Grey was dating you.”

“Beyond my outrageous good looks, you mean? I didn’t really go to the train station, you know.” Tyler took another sip of my coffee and then turned to look through the door, to where Grey slept on the squalid rug. “I want her to be okay. I need her to be okay.”