“Remember that summer you liked that girl who worked at theboardwalk? Angie?”“No,” he said, but I knew he was lying. “What about her?”“Did you ever hook up with her?”Conrad finally lifted his head up from the couch. “No,” he said.“I don’t believe you.”“I tried, once. But she socked me in the head and said she wasn’t that kind of girl.I think she was a Jehovah’s Witness or something.”

“My dad once told me that Winstone Churchill said that Russia was riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. According to my dad, Churchill had been talking about my mother. This was before the divorce, and he said it half-bitterly, half-respectfully. Because even when he hated her, he admired her.I think he would have stayed with her forever, trying to figure out the mystery. He was a puzzle solver, the kind of person who likes theorems, theories. X always had to equal something. It couldn't just be X.To me, my mother wasn't that mysterious. She was my mother. Always reasonable, always sure of herself. To me, she was about as mysterious as a glass fo water. She knew what she wanted; she knew what she didn't want. And that was to be married to my father. I wasn't sure if it was that she fell our of love or if it was that she just never was. in love, I mean.”

“What now?”Conrad didn’t let me off the hook that easy. He said, “What now with you and Jeremiah or with you and me?”

“Do you like Cam?” the girl asked me casually. I wondered how she knew him—I thought he’d been a nobody just like me.“I barely even know him,” I told her, and her face relaxed. She was relieved. I recognized that look in her eyes—dreamy and hopeful. It must have been the way I looked when I used to talk about Conrad, used to try to think of ways to insert his name into conversation. It made me sad for her, for me.”

“You were gullible," he said. And then, "When you were really little, you hated carrots. You wouldn't eat them. But then I told you that if you ate carrots, you'd get X-ray vision. And you believed me. You believed everything I said." I did. I really did. I believed him when he said that carrots could give me X-ray vision. I believed him when he told me that he'd never cared about me. And then, later that night, when he tried to take it back, I guess I believed him again. Now I didn't know what to believe. I just knew I didn't believe in him anymore.”

“Do you remember infinity?”Slowly, I turned around. “What about it?”Tossing something toward me, he said, “Catch.”I reached out and caught it in the air. A silver necklace. I held it up and examined it. The infinity necklace.It didn’t shine the way it used to; it looked a bit coppery now. But I recognized it. Of course I recognized it.“What is this?” I asked.“You know what it is,” he said.I shrugged. “Nope, sorry.”I could see that he was both hurt and angry. “Okay, then. You don’t remember it. I’ll remind you. I boughtyou that necklace for your birthday.”My birthday.It had to have been for my sixteenth birthday. It was the only year he ever forgot to buy me a birthdaypresent—the last summer we’d all been together at the beach house, when Susannah was still alive.”

“I’d stayed away for two years. I had to. I knew I shouldn’t even be at the summer house, because being there, being near her, I would just want what I couldn’t have. It was dangerous. She was the one person I didn’t trust myself around. The day she showed up with Jere, I called my friend Danny to see if I could crash on his couch for a while, and he’d said yes. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I couldn’t leave.”