The Never List

and disaster. Of course, they aren’t blaming you. It’s just that, you know, you were so careless, you let the evil of the world come crashing down on your head.
    She didn’t understand what I had done. What we had done. She didn’t realize the extremes to which Jennifer and I had gone to insulate ourselves from every form of vulnerability. And it had still happened.
    Yet even as I stood there, furious, it occurred to me that if she wanted to use me in some way, there might be a way for me to use her as well. Was there more to learn from Adele after all?
    She had studied with Jack Derber, working side by side with him for two years. She had already told me that she had hidden from the FBI a large part of his past with BDSM, maybe because she’d had a hand in something even more nefarious. Maybe she wasJack’s partner in all this. Maybe that’s why nothing had seemed to faze her back then. My stomach turned at the thought that maybe none of it had been so surprising to her after all.
    “I’ll think about it,” I finally managed to mutter.
    “Well, let me know.” She pulled a card out of a pocket of her purse and scribbled something on the back. “Here, now you have all my numbers. Texting is good too. Let me know. I can rearrange things if you have a little time. How long are you in town?”
    “I’m not sure. I want to talk to some others who knew Jack. Someone told me he was friends with another professor here on campus. A Professor Stiller?”
    Adele flinched almost imperceptibly at the name but quickly regained her composure. “Yes, David Stiller. He’s here.”
    “He’s in the psychology department as well?”
    “Yes, as a matter of fact his office is right next to mine.” She didn’t sound very pleased about that.
    “Not a friend?”
    She laughed. “No, more of a rival, I’d say. We were friends long ago, but now I’d say our research is a little too similar, and our conclusions too different. I think the university rather enjoys it because it makes us the stars of the conference circuit. They like to put us on panels together to see us fight. That’s academia for you. Anyway, if you talk to him, I wouldn’t mention that you’ve been hanging out with me.”
    “Okay, thanks. As you said, we probably shouldn’t be disturbing others here in the library. I’ll leave you to your work.” I held up her card. “I’m really going to give it some thought.”
    She smiled and held out her hand, as if we were about to make some sort of pact. I stared at it probably a few seconds too long—her hand extended there in the air—while I frantically searched for a diversion.
    “Wait, I should give you my info.” I reached into my bag andpulled out a scrap of paper. After writing my cell number, I handed it over to her, careful to make sure our fingers didn’t touch.
    I looked back at her as I left the reading room. She sat perfectly still, watching me walk out, her eyes following my progress, her face as indecipherable as ever.

CHAPTER 19
    As I crossed back over the campus and passed through the heavy swinging doors of the Greek Revival psychology building, I remembered my own days in college, the days after I had escaped and was starting over, this time at NYU, this time alone.
    In retrospect it seemed that I hadn’t looked up from the ground the whole time I was there. I had spent three years in virtual solitude, cramming in a degree in record time by taking extra classes at night and during the summers.
    That second time through, though, I hadn’t had the same desire for a normal college experience as I’d had before. I didn’t want to go to parties. I didn’t study in the library. In fact, I didn’t even want anyone to know who I was. I never spoke to my classmates, never ate at the school cafeterias, never went to a single extracurricular event. The school was large enough to disappear in, and I tried. How I tried.
    It was also there that I first started using my new name, a name I would never grow accustomed to. I always had to pause for a second before I signed anything, training myself to write it. I never remembered to look up when professors used it in class. I was sure they thought I was dense. Until I turned in my tests, that is, and they realized I had one gift after all.
    I majored in math, taking solace in the reliability of a field that offered nothing but solutions. I loved the way the numbers lined up in neat rows, a problem sometimes taking six or seven pages of my