He laughs softly. "Yeah. It's like... it's like most of the time, he barely notices me, and then when it's time to play he's on me like a starving dog. It wasn't that way at all, before. Used to be more - even. Now it's like he's got a couple hours here and there and the rest of the time God is looking over his shoulder and he has to act like nothing's up."

Bella shudders.

"You okay?"

"I'm worried about you."

He grins. "Aww."

"I'm trying to figure out if this is evidence for or against the pod person theory."

"It does kind of seem like... I don't know. Like he's someone else, most of the time, and every so often he pops the cork and lets out the old Reggie."

"And this dates to when relative to when he started membership in the Sharing?"

"Yeah. Like, I don't know exactly when he signed up, but it was about the same time."

"Who does he seem like when he's being someone else?"

"Like he kind of doesn't give a shit about anything in the house, he's just there killing time and pretending to be Reggie until he can get back to what matters," says Trouble. "Reggie was never like that. I mean, you know, he didn't have great interests, but he had interests. I figured... I don't know what the hell I figured. But it makes too much sense now that I've thought of it. There's Reggie and then there's Fake Reggie."

"And what matters is - not transparent to you, whatever it is?"

"Nah. Something he goes off and does, or something he's waiting for that hasn't happened yet - I just know it's not something he has or does around the house."

Write write write.

"You getting anything out of this?"

"I need to know more. I'm sure someone smarter than me could come up with all kinds of results just from what I have, but I am not smarter than me."

Trouble shrugs. "What do you have? Anything I don't know about yet?"

Bella flips through her notes, goes over all the facts again. Robin saw and heard these things, described them this way. Ethan found this fact which may connect the sighting and the Sharing, it dovetails with this behavior of Charlie's - and now that behavior of Reggie's - but Ethan's own parents are displaying nothing out of the limited ordinary. She reconstructs her reasoning about aliens versus demons or domestic science projects, and what tech they probably don't have.

"If they do replace people, I'd be more surprised if Ethan noticed anything from his parents," says Trouble. "Because they replace them pretty well, right? Reggie didn't come home from a meeting and turn nice, your dad didn't start acting like a totally different person. And faking Ethan's parents to Ethan is a cinch, you'd have to be seriously clueless to fuck it up. Nah, if you wanna know if Ethan's parents are pod people, you should find out from somebody who actually knows them. A coworker or something."

Bella nods, and writes this down.

"That's about the only bright idea I've got. But I don't know what it would even prove."

"It'd be evidence, if we could get it without tipping off said parents. If they have co-workers who aren't in the Sharing themselves."

"Yeah, but evidence for what? About what? Maybe we shouldn't even bother looking at Ethan's parents," he says. "Maybe we should start finding other members and seeing if they're pod people. Whoever we can find out about without tipping off the brain-eating alien cult. There, I had another bright idea."

"It's harder to know who to ask, in the case of strangers," says Bella. "I mean, it's a good idea, but I don't know how to implement it without a list of specific potential pod people."

"How'd Ethan find out the bookstore owner was a member? There's your list," says Trouble.