And I think about Mr. Verver and what he wants. The things he needs to know, most of all that Evie is okay. That she is really okay and there is nothing lying in wait under her skin, behind her eyes. Nothing broken that he can't see and can't fix.

But truly it's me. I need to hear her tell it, to give it all to me, to drop it, a gleamy pearl, in my open palm.

He loved you, Evie. He died for you. You have to tell.

I feel it pressing so hard on me. I can't stop myself. So I say it.

"Evie, tell me," I say. "Tell me now. What happened with you and Mr. Shaw?"

I feel her gather her breath deep. "Lizzie," she says, shaking her head over and over again. "No."

"Are you going to tell Dusty?" The words pushing from me and surprising me.

"No," Evie says, stirring suddenly. "Why would I tell Dusty?"

It was a crazy thing for me to say. Dusty still at their grandparents, I haven't even seen them in the same room since Evie's been back. Something rustles in me when I think of it. Have I even seen them together? But I push it aside.

"It's just, she told me you'd see him out there," I say. "She said the two of you would watch him out there, by the tree," I say, my voice taking on a funny wobble. Something seems so wrong all of a sudden. Some hinge squeaking in me.

"Lizzie, we never saw him together," she says, her voice newly cold. Quiet. Pulled in, tucked tight. "We never did at all."

My head feeling soft and confused, all I can think is, She's afraid, she's afraid to say.

And then I do it: "She thinks you knew he was going to take you."

"What?" she says, sitting up abruptly, her hands leaping to her throat, her jaw, a few tendrils sweaty-stuck there.

"It's okay if it's true. I'd never tell," I promise with all the urgency I have. "Neither of us ever told."

She leans close to me.

"Lizzie, don't you listen to her," she says, a quiet pleading in her voice, like she's trying to make things plain, for a child. "You don't understand about that."

"What do you mean?" I say, flinching. "I understand."

"I mean about Dusty," she says, and she won't quite look at me. "She doesn'ta Dusty doesn't understand things like that."

"But I do," I say, with such fancied wisdom. "I understand how you could look out that window night after night and see him there and never tell."

"Lizzie," she says, "he didn't take me at all."

There is such a quiet on us both, a sense of true hushness. There's knowing and there's knowing and I knew this, innermost, didn't I?

"I went," she says. "I went with him. I wanted to go. I asked him to take me away."

She says it and it seems like all the far-flung pieces jolt into place. I feel the jolt in me and I nearly shake.

Of course.

I knew it, didn't I?

It was no kidnapping at all.

"I understand, Evie," I say, firming my voice as much as I can, caught in the lusciousness of all things, and the wickedness too. "He loved you so much. It's okay if you loved him."

Because that was the real secret, wasn't it? Barely a secret at all.

You love him.

And you can tell me now and we can share again, such private, furtive things. Things we can tell no one else.

But she's shaking her head wearily, the oldest woman in the world.

"You're wrong, Lizzie," she says, and it's a sad, beaten smile. "You're wrong about everything."

It's such a sharp dismissal. I feel it cruelly.

"What do you mean?" I say, face burning. The youngest girl in the group, the baby everyone rolls their eyes at.

The smile drops away and she puts her hand on me. And I know she's going to do it. I know at last she's going to tell. But suddenly I don't know if I'm ready for it.

"I don't remember when it started," she says. "Just, one day, I knew."

"Knew he was watching," I almost stutter.

"Knew everything," she says. "I don't know how to say it. It was like this. I could see how it was in him and he couldn't fight it."

She turns on her side and faces me. She leans close to me and talks right into my ear, her mouth nearly touching my hair.

"He told me it was like a piercing thing in his chest. One day, it just happened. He saw me and it happened, and after that there was nothing else. A hole in his chest like you could stick your finger in."

I feel a shudder right through me, quaking. I feel my thighs go loose and hot. Oh my, it's a sickness. A sickness. I swoon into it. She is telling, she is finally telling. It's like dipping your toe in a magical lake in some fairy tale.

The beauty of it, I wait for it.

She tells me how she saw him all the time, in the yard, on the street, outside the school. He would watch and never say a word. It was like her special secret and she had to admit, there was something in it that drew her close. There was something in him, always there, always looking at her. Why, it moved her. It did.

She tells me how she knew it would happen eventually. She'd known it for a while.

That day, walking with me, our clacking hockey sticks, she saw his car go by, twice. She couldn't think of a day in the last year when she hadn't seen his car. But today would be different. She knew it would. She knew somehow she'd end up in that car with him.

And when they were driving away, she thought, This is it. This is it. It's all begun, and how could it stop now?

As he drove, he told her how it had been. How he loved her, but the love grieved him, shamed him. It had begun last summer, but really long before that. He saw her at the pool, doing dives. Watching her, it all came back to him. How, nearly ten years ago, he'd seen her fall in the water at Green Hollow Lake. The most important moment of his life.

"He pulled me out," she tells me now. "No one saw me fall, but he saw, and he rescued me."

I put my fingers to my mouth, tapping them there. I am thinking of something, something far away, but I cannot hold onto it.

And then he told her when he saw her at the pool last summer, all those years later, it all came back to him.

He said it was like a hammer on his heart.

The words crackle in my head. To hear something like that, what would it mean? Would it change your life? How could it not?

They drove for hours, she says, but they never seemed to get anywhere. Sometimes they pa.s.sed the same spots. Like he couldn't decide about something. She kept seeing the same motel. The big sign, like a deck of cards, and a swiveling diamond in each corner.

It seemed like he'd never stop driving. But finally he did. They sat in the car in the motel parking lot for an hour before he went inside to check in.

He said he'd thought many, many times of ending everything.

And he reached his arm in front of her, careful not to touch her, and clicked open the glove compartment.

He didn't take it out. He just pointed at it. The handgun there, so small, like a toy.

The shame, it was so heavy, he said. So many times, he thought he couldn't go on. But he was a coward, really. And he couldn't bear the thought that he'd never see her again, never see her in her summer shorts, dangling her legs. Never see her dive from the high board, her face in such concentration. Never see her flipping cartwheels on her front lawn.

He snapped the glove compartment shut and he looked at her, for the first time, really. She must have shown him something on her face, because that was when he got out of the car and walked, hands in his pockets so fast, to the registration office.

"The room was so small," she tells me, "and there was a picture of a leopard over the bed. He was so nervous. But I wasn't nervous at all."

I am waiting. I am waiting and my stomach is so tight, my hands clamped between my thighs.

"He sat on the bed," she says, "and I sat on a chair, and he talked for a long time about his life and how it was over for him now and he didn't care."

My heart beats, my heart beats.

"It was so late when I told him," she says. "I promised him it was okay. Because it was okay."

She can't say it, but I feel what she means. He loves her, he loves her and it's the biggest feeling she's ever known and she feels special in it, and she is. And who wouldn't?

She wriggles up on her elbows. "I told him he could," she says. "And then he did."

I feel like she's skipping things, I feel like she's moving too fast.

Slow down, slow down.

I shut my eyes tight, I shut them so tight.

"But, Lizzie, it wasn't okay after all," she says, her voice suddenly brimful, aching. "It wasn't okay, but then it was too late."

My eyes open and I see her face, moon-daubed.

"He should've seen," she says, her lip lifting, baring her teeth. "He did see. But he couldn't stop."

My eyelids flutter involuntarily.

"It burned like cigarettes. Like this." She pokes an imaginary cigarette into the soft flesh on the underside of her forearm.

"And it lasted forever. I kept squirming and the burning turned to tearing. He should've stopped, but he couldn't."

I feel my head nodding, my jaw creaking.

"And after," she says, "in the bathroom, little pieces of b.l.o.o.d.y guck came out of me, stuck to my legs. I couldn't move without more coming."

My hand over my moutha"why is she doing this? I feel suddenly like she's doing something to me. Something awful. And she is, isn't she?

"He kept knocking on the bathroom door," she says, relentless. "He was so sorry. He was so sorry. How could he have known? That's what he said.

"Then he was crying and I promised him it was okay. I promised every time."

Every timea every time.

"Because once he'd done it, it was like he couldn't stop," she says. "All those daysa" Her voice drifting.

I can't listen. I can't.

"Lizzie," she whispers, her voice a needle in my ear, "he loved me so much in those nineteen days I thought I might die from it."

I cover my ears, I clamp my hands over them.

"One night, really late," she said, her hands on me, hot and relentless, "he cried after. He cried for so long. He went to get ice and when he came back he had the gun, from the glove compartment.

"He put it under his chin, standing there at the foot of the bed, and he said I should just tell him to do it and he would."

My hands on my ears, rocking, trying not to see Mr. Shaw, but seeing him.

"I told him to put the gun down. Would you believe it? It didn't seem strange at all. Not after everything. That's how different everything was.

"He crawled into the bed and cried like a baby. He said he never would, not now, because of what I'd taught him.

"He said I'd taught him how to love."

There they are, the words I've been waiting for, but not like this. None of it's right, it's not. I don't know how to make it stop.

"He told me he knew they would find us," she says. "And I told him I wasn't sorry, even though I was."

She looks at me. She's making sure I feel every bit of it. And I do.

"But maybe I'm not really sorry," she says carefully. "He saved me, so I gave him this thing. Even if he shouldn't have taken it, I guess I don't feel bad for giving it."

He saved me.

She slips her hand in my hair, tugging me toward her.

"And when he dropped me off, he said this thing."

My hands fisted over my ears, but nothing can stop her.