The hotel room is dim inside and cool. Emily walks in, dumps her purse on one of the beds, and eases off her flip-flops. She sits down. Aaron sits on the edge of the opposite bed. She meets his eyes and in the weak light his face looks carved and stern, like a stone idol. A light shiver sweeps up her spine.

“All right.” He folds his hands. “You have your privacy.”

“Okay.” Emily pulls her legs up and sits cross-legged. “Ask me a question.”

His eyes close and she watches his face change into something cold. “When did this…what do you even call it?” His eyelids lift. “Do you call it a relationship? An affair? What?”

Emily hauls her purse into her lap. “That’s three questions.”

His mouth makes a tight line in his face. “When did it begin?”

She unzips the purse and takes out a brush. “Which part?”

“Initial contact.”

“The beginning of March.” She tilts her head back, running the brush through her hair. “I don’t remember the date.”

“I have a hard time believing that. But all right.”

“That’s fine.” She gathers her hair into a ponytail. “It’s your right.”

“You aren’t going to make this easy, are you?”

She wraps an elastic around her hair, pulls to tighten it, and drops the brush into her purse. “You’re treating me like an unsub, Aaron.” She pushes the purse aside. “There’s no love or respect in that. So…no.” She looks into his eyes. “I suppose I’m not going to make this easy for you. I don’t think you’ve earned it.”

He looks at her. “What would that take?”

Emily leans forward. “I don’t want to talk about this with you. I’m not going to lie. I don’t want to open myself to…to your secret ridicule, your dissection of my experience. I don’t want to go there with you.” Her voice lowers, turns confidential. “I’ll tell you what, though: I’ve learned a few things. I’m learning more things right now, as a matter of fact, by having to sit here and look at your face.” A small smile drifts onto her face. “I’m learning what it’s like to be on the other side of the table. You, in your interrogator attitude, have all the power. You get to decide what’s real and what isn’t. You’re the one who gets to label all of my feelings and put them in little boxes. Bag and tag them. Hell, you even get to qualify them.” She gives him a bitter chuckle. “You get to decide what they really mean. With a single wave of your magic profiler wand, you can turn everything in my head into pathology.”

“If I’m hearing you as an unsub, Emily,” he says, pinning her with his eyes, “it’s because you’re sounding like one. Right now, you are. I can’t believe you don’t know that.”

She grins. “Of course I know it.” She stretches out her legs and crosses her ankles. “So what do you want to know? What do you really want to know. Ask me.”

He presses his lips together. “Did you kill those women?”

“No.”

“Did Foyet?”

“What do you think?”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“Of course it’s an answer. It’s just not an answer you like very much.”

“Do you know if he killed those women?”

Emily smiles.

“That look,” he says. “See, that look…it makes me think you do.”

“Of course it does.” She holds his gaze as she tilts her head. “Why do you think I’m doing it? You’re not the only profiler in this room.”

He straightens up. “Now you’re playing games.”

“No, Aaron. You’re playing games. Around and around we go, dancing around the questions you really want to ask. It doesn’t matter who killed those women. That’s for another team to figure out. This is about you and me. So why don’t you come out from behind your FBI credentials and ask me the real questions. Unless you’re scared?”

“I am.”

She climbs off the bed. She lifts her eyebrows at him. “I guess we’re done, then.”

“No.”

Emily slides into her flip-flops. She picks up her purse.

He glares at her. “I said no.”

She starts for the door.

“How do you know it isn’t Stockholm?”

Emily pauses, her hand on the doorknob.

“Did you…” His voice wavers. “Did you want it?”

She turns around, a small smile on her face. “Now that’s more like it.” She takes a step away from the door. “See, I knew you could do it. Bravo.”

He lets out an irritated sigh. “Don’t patronize me.”

“Okay. I won’t.” Emily keeps her eyes on his face. “I don’t have an answer for that, really. There’s no way for me to describe my experience in terms you’ll take at face value. I could say that I just know, but that’s vague and it isn’t based in cold hard facts. It’s not like he picked me up in a bar.” Her smile melts into a grin. “Except it kind of is, I guess, in a way. I did come here to meet him. We did meet in a bar.” She prowls the perimeter of the room. “But it’s not the same thing.”

“No, it isn’t.” His eyes follow her. “So there was no vacation.”

She shakes her head. “No.”

“Then why did you leave?” He studies her face. “Did something not go the way you planned?”

She halts. “I needed space. I needed to think.” With a smile she shakes her head. “There’s no thinking when George is around.”

The name strikes a soft place in his expression. “And what about me? Did you…” Aaron swallows. “Did you mean any of the things you said?”

She glances at the window. “Yes.”

“I don’t understand.”

She turns her back to the wall. “What?” She lifts an eyebrow. “What is there to understand?”

“I can’t imagine how you could mean any of it after where you’d been.”

“You’ve never had more than one lover at a time?”

“No.” Aaron shakes his head. “I haven’t. Is that what he is to you?”

Emily walks toward him on hesitant feet. Momentum rises through her, shifts from hip to hip. “We knew each other,” she says. “A long time ago.”

“What…you knew Foyet? How? Where?” He watches her approach. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Here.” She leans over, tosses her purse onto the bed. “Summers in Nantucket, Aaron.” She takes a seat next to him. “Every summer, until he was twenty years old, spent here. At a house in Siasconset, to be exact.” Her face is soft. “Look it up. I’m sure it’s there somewhere. Don’t you read your files?”

“But you. You weren’t here. You were in the Middle East by then.”

Emily holds up two fingers. “Two summers. Eighty-five and eighty-seven. My mother loves this fucking place. I don’t talk about it much.”

He looks at her. “Why not?”

Her smile is thin. “The memories aren’t the best I’ve ever had.”

His voice softens. “What happened?”

“I don’t remember all of it.” She turns away and looks at her lap. “The summer of eighty-five was just boring, there was nothing to do except go to the beach. The summer of eighty-seven, though…” She trails off, looking at the cream-colored wall with its paintings of cranberry bogs. “I spent a lot of it drunk off my ass. It’s the only time I ever did a lot of drinking, and the only time I ever drank until I passed out.” She laughs. “For a couple of weeks I’d do nothing but drink until I fell asleep or passed out, whichever happened first. I had a lot of blackouts that summer. It wasn’t hard to get the liquor, you know, there was always stuff in the cottage and the staff would just replace it without any questions asked. My mother was always having parties. My dad was just there, you know, dragged along to these lawn parties like an accessory.” She moves a hand over her face. “I’m lucky I didn’t get myself killed.”

“Okay?”

His tone of voice rolls out, a nice carpet, silky and soft under her feet. Come on, it whispers, walk down me. Go to the door in your head and open it. Let those old things fly out. Then we’ll catch them. We’ll hunt them down and put them back. The lock still works.

“So I spent a lot of time drunk. Stoned, when I could get something. I’ll tell you something about rich kids: they always have something, and whatever it is it’s always the best.” She straightens up, takes a deep breath. “So the upshot is that I don’t remember things from that summer so well. Parts of it are foggy. My recall is off.”

“But you remember George.”

Emily looks at him. “Yes. I do.”

“Does he remember you?”

Her smile comes on, uncertain, hovering close to something secret before spreading out. It trembles, reins itself back in. “Yeah.”

“What did you do?” Aaron puts a hand over hers. She flinches. He leaves it there, letting his knuckles soften. “Were you friends?”

“I have no idea what you’d call it.”

“What was he like?”

She bursts into a sudden spate of nervous giggling. “He looked like…he’d stepped out of a J. Crew ad. He was nineteen, I think? Eighteen? Oh, I don’t know. I just knew he was older. He was different. He wasn’t much like the other boys.”

“How so?”

She pulls her hand out from beneath his and lets it rest on her thigh. “He was only around for three weeks and then there was this regatta thingy whatever.” She waves a dismissive hand. “He left with his parents to go to Martha’s Vineyard. After that…I don’t know. He told me but I don’t remember.” She rolls her eyes and sighs. “After he left I got drunk, of course, because I was alone again. I didn’t want to be. Most of the kids were horrible. It sucked. I missed having him around.”

“What made him special?”

Emily looks at him. “He asked.”

Aaron reaches over and touches the backs of her fingers. “I don’t understand.”

She slips her fingers around his. She looks down at her hand and squeezes. “No matter what it was, he asked me if he could do it. He asked me for things.” She lifts her eyes. “He wanted me to say what I was thinking. He knew how to say things…how to ask the right questions. He could communicate. That’s pretty uncommon in a teenage boy.”

“Perhaps he was, uh, overcompensating. For a lack of social skills.”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.” She pulls away. “It was the most intense thing I’d ever done, having to think about things. Being forced to think. No one thinks at that age. Focusing…” She looks at him. “When you pause to ask permission at every stage of touching someone, of kissing someone, of undressing someone, it’s…well. It’s unbelievably erotic. There’s anticipation, yeah, but there’s something else. Intent, I think. Intent laid bare. It doesn’t sound like it would be erotic. It sounds like it would be a pain in the ass, like it would break the moment, but it doesn’t.”

“He wasn’t your first.”

Emily snorts. “No. But you know that.”

“But he was the first one that really mattered.”

“The first man?” She bites her lip and nods. “Yeah.”

Aaron lets out a shaky sigh and leans over his knees, propping his elbows on them. His face falls into his hands.

Emily leans over and whispers: “Is this too much for you?”

“No, no. I’m…” He puts a hand out and leans away from her touch. “I’m all right.” He rubs his forehead. “Just give me a minute. I need a minute.”

She puts her hands in her lap and watches him, the way he breathes, the fragile curve of his back. She wants run a finger down his vertebrae, count the ridges, pull up his shirt and murmur close to them: I see you, I read your unease, the way you brood beneath the skin.

“It makes me sick,” he says. “But I’m going to ask you anyway. I’m going to ask because you like that, right? You like being asked how you feel?”

“All right.”

“Do you…” He breathes hard. He looks up and she sees the perplexity creeping into his features, stealthy on heavy feet, opening cracks in his expression. “Do you…how can you? How do you love someone like that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know what?”

She shrugs. “How it works.”

Aaron stands. “How do you feel about him?”

“I don’t know.”

He holds still and tension hums up and down his limbs. “Are you telling me the truth?”

Emily watches him. “Yes.”

“I don’t understand but I need to. I need to understand this. Emily…I need you to explain.” His fists clench. “Explain!”

“I can’t.” She swallows. “Some things don’t have an explanation.”

“That’s bullshit! That is cop-out bullshit, a way to avoid taking responsibility, and you are so much better than that.”

“What are you gonna do, Aaron?” She looks up at him and keeps her voice soft. “Hit me?”

“No.” He paces a little and takes a deep breath. “No. Of course not. You’re right, I need to…” He rubs his forehead. “I need to calm down.”

She pats the bed. “Come here.”

He looks at her, startled.

She opens her arms. “Come here.”

Aaron lowers his voice and glowers. “This is not the way.”

“It is.” Her voice is soft, yielding. “Come here.” She arches her back and lifts off her shirt. “Don’t you want to?”

His eyes widen. “What are you doing?”

“Shhh.” She reaches behind and unfastens her bra, keeping her eyes on his. She stands. “It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay, Emily…Emily,” he says, trying to inject firmness into his voice. “Emily. This is a bad time to do this.” He looks into her face. “This is not a good idea.”

She picks up his hand and brings it to her chest. Aaron’s breath hitches. She looks up at him and lifts his palm off her skin, bringing it lower, molding it around the curve of her breast. Her stiff nipple slides between his knuckles. He looks down and his breath turns ragged.

Emily lifts herself up on the balls of her feet and kisses the underside of his jaw. She burrows her nose beneath his. She holds his hand against her breast as he leans forward, breathing into her mouth.

“Kiss me,” she whispers.