It’s Angela who won’t talk to her now, and the tenth time Mrs. Hall knocks on their front door and no one answers, Claire’s father gets a restraining order. Claire tells the reporter Aaron was a friend, that she was drunk and he was tak-ing her home, but the bones of that story don’t convince anyone it wasn’t all, at best, a tragic misunderstanding; at worst, a danger she didn’t see coming. Claire tells the reporter some innocuous nice thing about Seraphin’s boyfriend, and the paper calls him one of her best friends, after which she stops trying to explain

There is something firm and brotherly in his tone and it infuri-ates her

d it is all she can feel unless she’s making an active effort to feel something else. Tonight she is feel-ing drunk—pink and punchy and panty-dropping, because all of those things mean she is not at home,