I glanced at Jess but she was scratching her knee, choosing not to get into this. And what did Lissa know anyway? It was Dexter who’d stopped things, not me. But then again, I hadn’t tried to push it further, and there had been other chances. Not that that meant anything. At all.

“See?” Lissa said, pleased with herself. “You’re speechless.”

“I am not,” I said. “It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Dexter,” she said quietly, “was the closest you’ve come to love, Remy. Real love. And you dodged it, at the last second. But it was close. Real close. You could have loved him.”

“No way,” I said. “Not a chance.”

When I got home later that night I realized, irony of ironies, that I was locked out. I’d given my key to my mother, and never thought to ask for it back. Luckily, Chris was home. So I just tapped on the window over the kitchen sink, making him jump about four feet vertically and shriek like a schoolgirl, which made having to forge through the dark and navigate around the pricker bushes in the backyard at least worthwhile.

“Hey,” he said nonchalantly as he opened the back door, all cool now, as if we both hadn’t just witnessed this particularly spineless behavior. “Where’s your key?”

“Here, somewhere,” I said, stopping the door before it slammed shut. “Mom and Don were locked out earlier.” Then I filled him in on the gory details as he munched on a peanut butter sandwich-bread butts again-nodding and rolling his eyes in all the right places.

“No way,” he said as I finished. I shushed him, and he lowered his voice. Our walls, we both knew, were thin. “What a chump. He was yelling at her?”

I nodded. “I mean, not in a violent way. More in a pouty, spoiled brat kind of way.”

He looked down at the last remnants of bread butts in his hand. “No surprise there. He’s a total baby. And the next time I trip over one of those Ensures on the side porch someone’s going down. Down. ”

This made me smile, reminding me of how much I really liked my brother. Despite our differences, we did have a history. No one understood where I was coming from the way he did.

“Hey Chris?” I asked him as he pulled a carton of milk from the fridge and poured himself a glass.

“Yeah?”

I sat down on the edge of the table, running my hand over the surface. I could feel little pieces of sugar, or salt, fine but distinct beneath my fingers. “What made you decide to love Jennifer Anne?”

He turned around and looked at me, then swallowed with a glunking noise my mother always screamed at him about when we were kids, saying it made him sound like he was drinking rocks. “Decide to love?”

“You know what I mean.”

He shook his head. “Nope. No idea.”

“What made you,” I expanded, “feel like it was a worthwhile risk?”

“It isn’t a financial investment, Remy,” he said, sticking the milk back in the fridge. “There’s no math to it.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“What do you mean?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Forget it.”

He put his glass in the sink, then ran water over it. “Do you mean what made me love her?”

I wasn’t sure I could take further discussion of that question. “No. I mean, when you thought about whether or not you wanted to open yourself up, you know, to the chance that you could get really hurt, somehow, if you moved forward with her, what did you think? To yourself?”

He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Are you drunk?”

“No,” I snapped. “God. It’s a simple question.”

“Yeah, right. So simple I still don’t even know what you’re asking.” He flipped off the light over the sink, then wiped his hands on a dishtowel. “You want to know how I debated about whether or not to fall in love with her? Is that even close?”

“Forget it,” I said, pushing off the table. “I don’t even know what I’m trying to find out. I’ll see you in the morning.” I started toward the foyer, and as I got closer, I could see my keys laid out neatly on the table by the stairs, waiting for me. I slid them into my back pocket.

I was on the second step when Chris appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Remy.”

“Yeah?”

“If what you’re asking is how I debated whether or not to love her the answer is I didn’t. Not at all. It just happened. I didn’t ever question it; by the time I realized what was happening, it was already done.”

I stood there on the stairs, looking down at him. “I don’t get it,” I said.

“What part?”

“Any of it.”

He shrugged and flipped off the last kitchen light, then started up the stairs, brushing past me. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Someday, you will.”

He disappeared down the hall, and a minute later I heard him shut his door, his voice low as he made his required good-night-again-this-time-by-phone call to Jennifer Anne. I washed my face, brushed my teeth, and was on my way to bed when I stopped by the half-open door of the lizard room.

Most of the cages were dark. The lights for the lizards were kept on timers, which clicked them on and off at just the right cycles to make the lizards believe, I supposed, that they were still sunning themselves on desert rocks instead of sitting in a cage in a converted linen closet. But at the far end of the room, on a middle shelf, one light was on.