She couldn’t stand in this hallway forever. She considered going to Nate’s room, but her troubles were too large. She could not explain the feeling of the world being swept away. She put one leaden foot in front of the other to get back to the stairs, half wishing she tumbled down them in the dark and broke her noncompliant legs and knocked herself out. But she didn’t really want that, because she held the rail and the wall and took the steps with care.

Maybe David would come out of his room and stand at the top of these steps, looking down at her, eyes soft and contrite. His hair would be standing up a bit from where he’d run his hands through it in despair at what he had just said. He would say something like, “Hey, why don’t you come back up.” And she would pause like she was considering it and then say . . .

Maybe the sun would get around to it and finally swallow the world.

Now she was standing in her own dark hallway, which felt even bleaker. She was too confused to cry, too broken to sleep, too lost to move. But there was a light on in the common room. Someone was awake. Stevie didn’t want to see anyone, but she also didn’t want to be alone. She was trapped in the hall, stuck in every space in between where she needed to be.

But you can’t stay in the hall forever. That’s not what halls are for. She made her way to the end and peered around the doorway and caught sight of the inhabitant. It was Hunter, wearing the fleece she had gotten for him that day in Burlington, huddled on the sofa, bent over a tablet. The room still smelled of old smoke, but the fire was out in the fireplace. He didn’t see her, and she considered backing away, but she couldn’t make up her mind about going forward or backward. She must have made a noise by accident, because Hunter looked up and jolted.

“Jesus!” he said, almost dropping the tablet.

It was a good look, probably, just her head poking around the corner, like a ghoul.

“Sorry! Sorry. Sorry, I . . .”

“It’s fine,” he said, recovering himself. “I’m not used to this place. Are you . . . okay?”

Stevie would sooner have dropped into the molten core of an erupting volcano more willingly than she would tell someone she was not okay. She nodded briskly.

“Can’t sleep,” she said.

She strode across the room like she had meant to be here all along and busied herself in the kitchen for a moment, filling the electric kettle to make herself a hot chocolate. She dumped two packages into a mug and looked at the pile of chocolate dust she intended to consume. Was this supposed to make up for something, this dust? Was it supposed to repair whatever in her that had ripped in two?

That was a lot to ask of a mug of cocoa dust.

“Do you want something?” she said to Hunter, leaning out of the kitchen. “To drink? I’m . . .”

She jabbed her hand in the direction of the kettle to indicate “I am bringing water to the boiling point in order to make hot beverages of all kinds.”

“Sure,” he said. “Some tea or something?”

Stevie stuck a tea bag in another mug and brought both drinks out. Hunter had chosen one of the coldest spots in the room to sit. There was frigid air coming down from the chimney, as well as slipping in from the front door.

“Find anything good?” she asked, setting down the mug on the brick edge of the fireplace.

“I don’t know what I’m looking at,” he said. “We got a drive each to read. I read about a thousand emails about campaign strategy and dozens of spreadsheets of financial transactions. The emails show that everyone in this campaign is an asshole. No surprises there. I don’t know what the spreadsheets mean. Someone is paying a lot of money for something, but I have no idea what it is or what it’s for. This is a weird way to spend a night.”

He shoved the tablet between the sofa cushions and picked up the mug.

“Thanks,” he said. “I didn’t think my aunt’s house was going to burn down. I didn’t think I’d be up here, in a blizzard, reading emails from inside the Edward King campaign.”

It was a good reminder that someone had bigger problems than she did.

“Can I ask you something?” he said. “David? Is he . . .”

Stevie waited for the end of the question, because questions about David could go a lot of ways. Everything inside her coiled up like a defensive snake.

“I mean, the first time I saw him was when he was getting beaten up. And he’s King’s son. And getting this stuff? I mean, stealing it . . . it’s pretty hardcore. It’s good? I think? I don’t know what to think.”

“Me either,” Stevie said.

“You and he . . .” Hunter let the words linger. “There’s something. There’s obviously something.”

“No,” she said, looking into the sludge of chocolate she was drinking, with gray, scummy lumps of undissolved cocoa floating on top.

“Oh,” he said. “Sorry.”

Hunter was perceptive enough to know that sorry was probably the right word. She felt her shoulders relax a bit but kept her gaze deep into the murk of her drink. They settled into an uncomfortable silence for a moment. Hunter was an easy person to look at—not in the sense that he was stunningly handsome, like some kind of consumable. He was easy in his manner. Unlike David, he didn’t appear to be sizing you up. The spray of freckles across his face was like a starry sky. He had a strong build. He was solid and real. He could be trusted.

“Can I talk to you about your aunt a little?” Stevie asked.

He nodded.

“On the night—the other night—I called her,” Stevie said. “She seemed busy. She said she couldn’t talk. It seemed like someone was there. Did you see anyone?”

“No,” he said. “I had my headphones on. You know she used to play her music really loud, and the downstairs smelled a lot, so I stayed upstairs most of the time. I was working on my end-of-semester paper. I was way into all the plastics we find in the ocean.”

“So the first thing you noticed . . .”

“Was smoke,” he said. Something passed across his face as he said the word. His gaze turned away from her and went up and over, which, according to the books Stevie had read about profiling, meant someone was remembering. “I smelled it. I’ve smelled smoke before, but this was a lot of smoke, and it had this really harsh smell. Not like woodsmoke. Like things were burning that shouldn’t be burning. You know when you smell something like that that something is wrong. I pulled off my headphones and then there was this sound, like cracking. Imagine a tray of glasses falling over and over. By the time I got to the door and to the stairs, it all happened really fast. There was smoke, fumes. I had trouble seeing getting down the stairs; it was burning my eyes . . .”

He was shaking his head as he spoke, as if he couldn’t believe what he had seen.

“The kitchen, where she was, must have gone up quickly. I guess the gas had been going for a while. It spread into the living room. There was so much flammable stuff everywhere—books and papers and trash. All that furniture was old, and the carpets were too. By the time I got to the bottom of the stairs . . . I saw fire pretty much everywhere leading to the kitchen. I called to her. I think I tried to get to her office to see if she was in there, then I was going to try to run through to the kitchen. Somewhere in there I passed out.”

Stevie had no idea what to do for a moment. Her thoughts of David were temporarily suspended. Hunter lingered in his memory for a moment, then let out a loud sigh and rubbed his face.

“Maybe I’m more freaked than I realized. I’m fine, but it’s . . . it was a lot of fire.”

Stevie looked back down into her drink.

“What are you going to do?” she said.

“Go to therapy,” he replied, dealing the cards. “I was just in a house fire that killed my aunt. I’m calm now, but I don’t think that’s going to last forever.”

“That seems really smart,” Stevie said.

“It is smart. I’m a smart guy.”

He went silent for a moment, and Stevie felt a burble of anxiety putter up to the surface.

“Was that your question?” he said. “Or was there something else?”

Everything in his tone said, “I too am fine and am ready to move on with the conversation.”

“She said something really weird on the phone,” Stevie said. “‘The kid is there.’ Do you know what she was talking about?”

“‘The kid is there’?” he repeated, shaking his head. “I have no idea what that means. You don’t think . . . Alice?”

“Alice wouldn’t be here,” Stevie said. “It makes no sense.”

“Maybe she didn’t say kid? Maybe she said . . .” He searched for something that sounded like kid, then shook his head. “Look, my aunt was drunk that night. Really drunk. So drunk she burned the house down.”

“She said kid,” Stevie replied.

Hunter shook his head in confusion.

“Then I have no idea what she meant. But she was really hung up on the codicil for those last few days. She was talking about it more and more. She said Mackenzie told her. There was a document. He hid it so that the place wouldn’t be overrun with fake Alices. She said the school knew all about it and was banking on it, because when it expired, they would get the money.”