Chapter 45

He turns the light off and lies down. Dustin has slept in lots of different beds in his lifetime, in lots of different places—he gets used to them pretty quickly. Just this week he’s been in several different motel rooms. But somehow being in Ronan’s spare bedroom feels different from staying in a room he has rented for the night, and not just because he’s not sharing the room this time.

A home can tell you a lot about a person. Ronan normally doesn’t like to open up about himself, but by letting Dustin into his home, it’s like maybe he doesn’t feel like he needs to hide from Dustin as much. Or maybe in the morning Dustin will find the house to be as soulless as he first thought Ronan was when he saw him at the college crime scene.

Dustin can’t tell much from the spare room and the bathroom, so he guesses he’ll have to wait and see—until then, he does his best to sleep. 7