The Gray Man checked out of Pleasant Valley Bed and Breakfast and placed his suitcase just inside the door of Maura’s bedroom. He didn’t unpack it. It was not that long until the Fourth. There was no point.

Calla said, “Give me some poetry, and I’ll make you a drink.”

The Gray Man said, “‘Our hearts must grow resolute, our courage more valiant, our spirits must be great, though our strength grows less.’”

Then he did it in the original Old English.

Calla made him a drink.

Then Maura made something with butter and Calla made something with bacon and Blue steamed broccoli in self-defense. In the rest of the house, Jimi got ready for her night shift and Orla answered the ever-ringing psychic hotline. The Gray Man got underfoot trying to be helpful. He understood that this was an ordinary night at 300 Fox Way, all of this noise and commotion and disorder. It was a senseless sort of dance, artful and confused. Blue and Maura had their own orbit; Maura and Calla another. He watched Maura’s bare feet circle on the kitchen floor.

It was the opposite of everything he had cultivated for the past five years.

How he wanted to stay.

This isn’t a life for what you are, he told himself.

But for tonight, he would pretend.

At dinner, Calla said, “So, what’s next?” She was only eating the foods with bacon in them.

Blue, who was only eating broccoli, answered, “I guess we have to find a way to make Joseph Kavinsky stop dreaming.”

“Well,” Maura asked. “What does he want?”

Blue shrugged from behind her mountain of broccoli. “What does a drug addict want? Nothing.”

Maura frowned over her plate of butter. “Sometimes everything.”

“Either way,” Blue replied, “I can’t see how we can offer that.”

The Gray Man politely interjected, “I could talk to him this evening for you.”

Blue stabbed a piece of broccoli. “Sounds great.”

Maura gave her a look. “What she means to say is, no thanks.”

“No,” Blue said, brows beetled, “I meant to say, and can you make him feel worthless while you do?”

“Blue Sargent!” Maura looked shocked. “I didn’t raise you to be violent!”

Calla, who’d inhaled some bacon while laughing, clutched the table until she stopped choking.

“No,” Blue said dangerously. “But sometimes bad things happen to good children.”

The Gray Man was amused. “The offer stands until I go.”

The phone rang. Upstairs, they heard the sound of Orla scrambling desperately for it. With a pleasant smile, Maura snatched the downstairs extension and listened for a moment.

“What an excellent idea. It will be harder to trace,” Maura told the phone. To the table, she said, “Gansey has a Mitsubishi that Mr. Gray can take instead of his rental. Oh, he says it was actually Ronan’s idea.”

The gesture warmed the Gray Man considerably. The reality of his escape was far more difficult than he’d admitted to any of them. There was a car to worry about, money for food, money for gas. He had left a dirty pot in the sink at his home back in Massachusetts, and he would think about it forever.

It would help if he didn’t have to steal the Champagne Disappointment. He was gifted at car theft, but he longed for simplicity.

To the phone, Maura said: “No — no, Adam’s not here. He’s with Persephone, I believe. I’m sure he’s all right. Would you like to talk to Blue? No —?”

Blue’s head ducked to her plate. She stabbed another piece of broccoli.

Maura hung up the phone. She looked narrowly at Blue. “Did you two fight again?”

Blue muttered, “Yep. Definitely.”

“I can have a talk with him as well,” the Gray Man offered.

“I’m good,” she replied. “But thanks. My mother didn’t raise me to be violent.”

“Neither,” observed the Gray Man, “did mine.”

He ate his broccoli and butter and bacon, and Maura ate her butter, and Calla ate her bacon.

It was another frenzied dance to clean up after dinner and fight for showers and television and who got which chair. Maura gently took the Gray Man’s hand and led him to the backyard instead. Under the black, spreading branches of the beech tree, they kissed until the mosquitos became relentless and the rain began to fall.

Later, as they lay in her bed, his phone buzzed a call, and this time it went to voicemail. Somehow, he always knew it would end this way.

“Hey, Dean,” said his brother. His voice was slow, easy, patient. The Allen brothers were alike, that way. “Henrietta is a pretty little place, isn’t it?”