This was the other world, the one to which Nest alone had access. Since she was very small, she had worked to understand it, to help Pick maintain it, and to find a way to reconcile it with the world that everyone else inhabited and believed fully defined. There, in no-man’s-land between the known and the secret, she was an anomaly, never entirely like her friends, never just another child.

“You’ve lived in your grandparents’ house all your life,” Robert said suddenly, eyes determinedly fixed in a forward direction. They were crossing the entrance road and moving into the scattering of shade trees and spruce that bordered the picnic grounds leading to the chain-link fence and the cemetery. “That house is your home, Nest. If you sell it, you won’t have a home anymore.”

She scuffed at the damp grass with her tennis shoes. “I know that, Robert.”

“Do you need the money?”

“I could use it. Training and competition is expensive. The school doesn’t pay for everything.”

“Why don’t you take out a mortgage, then? Why sell, if you don’t have to?”

She couldn’t explain it to him, not if she tried all day. It had to do with being who she was, and that wasn’t something Robert could know about without having lived her life. She didn’t even want to talk about it with him because it was personal and private.

“Maybe I want a new home,” she said enigmatically, giving sudden, unexpected voice to the feelings that churned inside her. It was hard to keep from crying as she thought back upon their genesis.

Her friends were gone, all but Robert. She could still see their faces, but she saw them not as they were at the end, but as they were when they were still fourteen and it seemed as if nothing in their lives would ever change. She saw them as they were during that last summer they were all together, on that last weekend before everything changed—when they were close and tight and believed they could stand up to anything.

Brianna Brown and Jared Scott moved away within a year of that summer. Brianna wrote Nest at first, but the time between letters steadily lengthened, and finally the letters ceased altogether. Nest heard later that Brianna was married and had a child.

She never heard from Jared at all.

Cass Minter remained her oldest and closest friend all through high school. Different from each other in so many ways, they continued to find common ground in a lifetime of shared experiences and mutual trust. Cass planned to go to the University of Illinois and study genetics, but two weeks before graduation, she died in her sleep. The doctor said it was an aneurysm. No one had suspected it was there.

Jared, Brianna, and Cass—all gone. Of her old friends, that left only Robert, and by the end of her freshman year at Northwestern, Nest could already feel herself beginning to drift. Her parents were gone. Her grandparents were gone. Her friends were gone. Even the cats, Mr. Scratch and Miss Minx, were gone, the former dead of old age two years earlier, the latter moved to a neighbor’s home with her grandfather’s passing. Her future, she thought, lay somewhere else. Her life was going in a different direction, and she could feel Hopewell receding steadily into her past.