“What does that mean?” I said. “Anybody but us?”
Diane opened her mouth.
Graham said, “Di. Don’t.”
She closed it.
And she walked out of the office without another word.
Mr. Burke suspended Wyatt for two days for misusing school computers.
I didn’t argue.
In the car, I held out my hand. Wyatt put his phone in it without a word. Then his laptop. Then the little notebook he kept in his back pocket, which turned out to be full of words like cytokine and apheresis and minimal residual disease, written in his terrible handwriting, with definitions next to each one.
I drove home with my hands shaking on the wheel.
“You lied to me,” I said at a red light. “Every night. For four months.”
“I know.”
“You pretended to be a grown man to a hospital. You pretended to be me to thirty-one thousand dollars’ worth of strangers.”
