David dug into a pocket and produced a battered deck of cards.

“Pick one,” he said, presenting the pack to Stevie. As he leaned in, Stevie picked up a number of scents. There was something low and funky that she couldn’t place, along with the stale air from a plane.

Stevie did not want to pick a card, but the pack was outstretched. So she pulled one out.

“Look at it,” David said. “Don’t show me.”

Stevie eyed the jack of hearts in her palm.

“Okay,” David said, tipping his head back, looking at the ceiling of the yurt. “Is it . . . the three of clubs?”

“No.”

“Okay. The six of diamonds?”

“No.”

“The ace of spades?”

“No.”

David hmmed. Nate shifted in commiseration, but Janelle gave an obliging smile. Ellie draped herself over the back of the sofa.

“Seven of hearts?” he said.

“You should probably give up now,” Stevie replied.

“No, no,” he said, “I always get it within the first fifty-two guesses.”

That got a little laugh from Janelle, but Stevie suspected it was simply politeness.

“Okay,” David said, looking back down and taking a deep breath. “Last guess. Is it . . . the king of clubs?”

Stevie held up the jack of hearts.

“Yeah,” he said. “I wasn’t going to guess that. I was just naming cards.”

He plucked the card from her hand and shoved it back in the deck. Stevie felt a burning rush of blood to her cheeks. Was this mockery? What the hell did it mean? Stevie could handle mockery. What she couldn’t stand was not understanding. The yurt was close and the air thick.

Ellie gently whacked David on the head, sending feathers flying.

“You’re so dumb, David,” she said affectionately. She gave Stevie a reassuring smile over his head. “I was starting to worry you weren’t coming.”

“I almost didn’t make it,” he said. Then, to everyone, he said, “I was a little distracted last year.”

“He sat in his room and smoked weed and played video games,” Ellie clarified.

“You make it sound like I was doing nothing,” David replied. “It was all research.”

“David makes video games,” Ellie said. “Or he says he does.”

“So,” David said. “Who are you people?”

More introductions went around, thanks to Janelle. Nate was again singled out as the one who wrote that book that one time. And then they got to Stevie.

“She researches crime,” Janelle said.

“Researches crime?” he repeated. “What does that mean?”

“What it sounds like,” Stevie said.

“You . . . watch a lot of Discovery ID?” he said.

She did watch a lot of Discovery ID, as it happened. That was the all-murder channel. She did not say this, though.

“She does criminology and things like that,” Janelle said, maybe a little defensively. “And she knows everything about the Ellingham case. That’s why she’s here.”

“What, are you here to solve it?” he asked.

Stevie gulped in some air.

Yes, that was kind of the plan. But no one else was supposed to say it, and they really weren’t supposed to say it like that. It was like he had just taken her dreams, which had been floating so gently and rising so high this whole day, and with one prick of a pin, popped them, exploded them. Rubbery dream pieces all over the yurt.

“You weren’t going to say that, were you?” he said. His eyes were so bright, so piercing.

There was an awkward pause in their corner. To end it, Ellie tipped herself off the edge of the sofa into David’s lap.

“I thought that was solved,” she said to Stevie. “Wasn’t it? Didn’t someone confess?”

“Someone was found guilty,” Stevie said. “He probably didn’t do it. He confessed because . . .”

A burst of laughter from behind, and Ellie looked up to see what was going on. No one wanted to hear why Anton Vorachek, the local anarchist who was arrested and tried for the crime, confessed.

“He confessed because he was on the stand . . .” Stevie tried to continue.

Unlike before, when everyone was listening, now there was a dance breaking out and David was doing this weird smirk and Janelle, Vi, and Nate looked vaguely uncomfortable.

You know when your moment is over.

A flask appeared from somewhere. Ellie had some. David passed. It was waved in Janelle, Nate, and Stevie’s direction, and they all shook their heads. Stevie thought drinking from containers other people drank from was gross. She embraced Locard’s exchange principle: every contact leaves a trace, meaning in this case, backwash.

Ellie and David went away to talk to some other second years, leaving the first years on their own.

“He seems fun,” Janelle said with forced brightness.

Nate was unable to bring himself to lie.

“I feel kind of better,” he said to Stevie. “I think you’re even more screwed than I am.”

Nights always brought the worry. Night was hard.

It was three in the morning and Stevie was wide awake. If she was going to have a panic attack, it would likely be tonight. New school, new start, new friends, new home up here on the mountain when she’d never been away from home and her parents for more than a few days. The night brought cooler air, but still, the room felt a bit crowded. When she opened the window, a giant moth blew in. It beat a hasty path to the ceiling light and landed against it with a thunk.

“I know the feeling,” Stevie said to it.

The panic attacks had started when she was twelve years old. No one knew why. Her parents tried to help but were largely confused by them. Medication took care of some of it, but Stevie had worked out the rest with some assistance from the school counselor and by reading more or less the entire internet.

It had been a year and three months since Stevie stopped having the panic attacks all the time, and at least six months since she’d had a big one. But the nights still worried her. She still paced before she slept, eyeing her bed, wondering if this was going to be one of the nights she was dragged out of sleep by a heart racing like a car with no driver and a board pressed up against the gas pedal.

She sat on the floor beneath the window, closed her eyes, and let the breeze play on the back of her neck. Breathe in. Breathe out. Count. One. Breathe in. Breathe out. Two. Just let the thoughts come and go.

You weren’t going to say that, were you?

Let it go.

You can always come home.

Let it go, for real. Go full Frozen.

You’re even more screwed than I am.

She opened her eyes and looked over at her bureau. She could take an Ativan and knock herself out, but she would be groggy tomorrow.

No. She was going to do this. It was going to be fine.

So she turned to her other medicine—her mysteries. Stevie had always loved mysteries from the time she was small. When the attacks hit, she found that mysteries were her salvation. If she was awake at night, she had her mystery novels, her true-crime books, her shows, her podcasts. Maybe most people wouldn’t be soothed by reading about the acid bath murders, about Lizzy Borden or H. H. Holmes, about highway murders, about the quiet neighbor with the dark secret, about bodies in walls and latent fingerprints, about thirteen guests at dinner when you know they can’t all live. . . . These things were problems for her mind to work on, and when her mind worked on the mystery, it couldn’t panic.