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But, she doesn't. She just keeps being Lila, in her red coat, in her car, with her bread going cold on the console.

"Come with me," she says.

"What?"

"Right now. Get your cat and your coat and come with me." She's leaning forward. "If you walk in tomorrow on your own, before anybody has to reach for you, they'll deal. They want it given, not taken, that's the whole architecture of them, so if you offer it yourself you get to set..."

"Lila."

"...you get to set terms, you get a seat, you get to stand beside them, and I know how that sounds coming out of my mouth in this car, I know exactly how it sounds..."

"Stop."

She stops.

"That's your offer," I say. "Join the people who sent you to spy on me when I was twenty-nine so that in three years they'd have a way in?"

"It's not an offer. It's the only exit I could find." She's still crying, the ugly kind, the kind she'd never let happen in front of anybody else. "I've had four days to think of one. That's what I came up with. That's it. That's all I've got."

"Then it's not enough."

"I know."

"Get away from my house." I put my hand on the door. "Don't come to the shop. Don't bring me bread. Don't text me tomorrow to tell me you're thinking of me, because you will, you know you will, and I'm not doing that."

She looks at the steering wheel for a long time.

"I asked them to take me off you," she says. "Twice. Once after your mom. Once in July."

It’s a confession and it’s not, in any way, an answer to the question I asked about it being real, and we both sit there knowing it.

Sid hasn't made a sound this entire time. He's still on the hood with his ears flat, watching her through the glass, and he doesn't say one word, which from him is practically a eulogy.

I open the door.

The cold comes up my leg.

"Lila."

"Yeah?"

"You held my hand in a hallway for six hours. You were there for me when my mother died."

"I know."

"And, I don't know what to do with that."

"You don't have to do anything with it." She's looking at the road ahead of us. "You just have to not die tomorrow. That's all I want and I'm aware I don't have the right to want anything."

I put one foot on the gravel.

And her face changes as she looks past me into the side mirror and everything human goes out of her face and I see fear there.

"Get out of the car," she says.

"What?"

"Maren. Get out of the car. Now!"