They don’t even give me a day to settle in. The moment I wake up, Elaine knocks on my door.

“Your tutor is here, Maryanne,” she says. “I’ll leave breakfast for you in the study—hope you like eggs. It’s the last door on the left downstairs. Good luck!”

I take my sweet time fishing a clean skirt and a shirt from my suitcase. Then I remove the rest of my clothing, revealing what’s taken up the bulk of space: a stack of paperbacks with simple covers and pretentious titles. Wasteland. Murder Town. Swing.

They’re all written by the one and only James Thorne. Each one sports dogeared pages, their covers falling off, the pages yellowed. I grab one at random and flip through it. Swing. The last one he’s released and the only one he bothered to dedicate.

To the girl with the golden curls: I’m sorry.

Lucky Elaine.

She’s already gone when I head downstairs and find a new woman in her place. My tutor is wearing a starched dress suit and a pair of ugly brown loafers two sizes too big. Thorny and Elaine have sequestered her in a spacious office near the back of the house, coincidentally within earshot of both the kitchen and his office.

Just in case she screams.

I forget her name the moment she utters it and spend most of her introduction lecture doodling on the fringes of a notebook with a fancy silver pen that I assume came from Thorny’s collection. It’s tainted now, forever mine. Over is its life of penning overly analytical novels. It’s doomed to draw swirls on line paper in mind-numbing rows.

“Do you have any questions?” the tutor asks after an eternity of boring chatter.

“No,” I say, surreptitiously turning the page to a clean one. I flatten my hands over the small round table I’m seated at. It’s positioned near a corner, with a tempting view of the beach and the lower balcony from a different angle. Elaine wanders it, murmuring into a cell phone. Every few minutes, she throws her head back to laugh. Thorny’s gone. She must be talking to him.

How disgustingly loving.

“Maryanne?” The tutor raps her fingers along the edge of the table. She’s frowning, and once again, I feel the tug of Thorny’s invisible leash. Be a good girl.

“S-sorry.” I clamp my teeth to trap any other words behind them. Forcing a smile, I pick my pen up and keep scribbling.

We cover the usual suspects. A bit of math. A bit of science. Finally, English—my one problem subject. The tutor laments that I’m “just a little behind.”

“Language is always a tricky subject,” she explains, contorting her mouth in a way to convey concern and compassion. Her eyes widen, her lips downturned. She’s checking every tick on the list of empathy, but I feel nothing. “Even for children who grew up in bilingual households.”

Bilingual. Funny, considering that the only words of French I know are au revoir, non, and the myriad of ways to convey, “Go to hell, Charles! And take that little brat with you.”

“I’ve found that sometimes journaling a little every day can help to strengthen vocabulary and creative writing skills,” the tutor says. She rummages through her briefcase and returns with a slim, virgin notebook in the same shade as Thorny’s car: cherry red.

“A journal?” It takes effort to school my expression into a simpering grin. Journals are for those whiny bitches in boarding school with no real friends to spill their secrets to. Maybe they got stupid and scribbled down a few things they shouldn’t have. One sneaky case of theft later and their silly inner turmoil was the talk of the school.

“Just a few paragraphs a day. We can even discuss them if you want.”

I don’t need a fucking journal, are the words I bite back. “What should I write about?”

“Anything,” the woman says with a shrug. “Anything you’d like. Your hopes. Dreams. What you ate for dinner. I just want you to try to incorporate words or phrases you don’t normally use. Let’s start with one. How about…” She taps her chin like she’s thinking, but it’s painfully obvious she already has a phrase in mind. “This is what I discovered about myself today.”

My teeth strain against their gums, protesting how hard I’m gritting them. “Okay,” I finally say.

“Good. Then we’ll continue this tomorrow.” The tutor packs up her things and heads for the hallway. In a suspiciously timed coincidence, she nearly runs right into Thorny.

So he is home after all. I sneak a peek from the window, but Elaine’s still on the balcony. One of her hands plays with the ends of her hair as she leans against the railing, speaking into her cell phone.

Odd.

“How was she?” Thorny asks the tutor. Suspicion laces his tone.

I guess I’m not the only one struggling with my good behavior. His nonverbal cues cut right to the point: Give me a reason to break this off. Just a single one.

“She did great,” my tutor says. “Same time tomorrow, Maryanne?”

“Yes,” I say cheerfully. “Thank you, ma’am.”

Thorny glances me over, his eyes narrowed. “I’ll walk you out, Jane.” He offers his arm to the tutor and they head toward the front of the house. Where he’ll question her again, more earnestly. Be honest. You can tell me. What asinine thing did she do today?

Asinine. It’s one of the new words sprinkled on a vocabulary list I find tucked inside the cover of my journal. Asinine. Beatific. Egregious. Cautious. Denigrate…

Printed at the bottom of the sheet is my phrase for the day. What have I discovered about myself?

Well, for one, being good is fucking hard. The clock on the wall claims it’s barely noon. It feels later than that. An eternity since Thorny made his bet.

One month.

I have to sequester myself in the tutoring room just to last another hour. It’s not my fault. There are so many naughty things around here that a bad girl could stick her nose into. Nosy little questions, for instance.

Elaine puts her phone down, her faint smile fading. Thorny comes up behind her and her grip tightens on the banister as she looks back. She must say something to him, because he shakes his head and moves to stand at the opposite end of the railing. When Elaine faces the water again, her tiny smile is gone.

I don’t realize I’m tapping my pen against the journal’s cover until I miss and strike the table. Thwack! The noise reminds me of thunder. It’ll probably rain again today, erasing the hard work the sun put into drying out the fields and the lonely beach.

I’ve been into metaphors a lot lately, so I can’t help feeling as though the current weather is a giant one for what my presence does to Thorny and Elaine. It looms overhead, stealing the sunlight from their bright, cheerful lives. Boo hoo.

Thorny bet that I couldn’t last the week.

But can he?

He shifts as if sensing my naughty thoughts and his head swivels in my direction. I swear he’s glaring at me through the window, daring me to test his limits.

But I don’t.

I merely tap the nib of my pen against a blank page, mulling over my assignment. Good, dutiful daughters do their homework. They journal down their feelings in nice, neat paragraphs with no concern that they might be read by anyone else down the line. Naïveté is the word du jour.

That’s the trap of a diary: they’re practically designed to be read. This bright-red cover screams intrigue to anyone willing to turn the page—and everyone knows that secrets make the best weapon fodder. I learned that the hard way. Those written about are forever trapped on the page, locked within a certain context or moment with no shading to color the perspective. Just emotion.

It’s the most dangerous thing of all. Friends can seem more nefarious on paper. Cool teachers might be given more scrutiny.

And stuffy, overbearing uncles might not seem so perfect after all.