I CAN’T SLEEP. Splints is restless too. The TV is annoying with the sound on and too bright with it off. With no TV it’s too everything. My head’s full of what-ifs. What if she’d come after me? What if she did follow me home, despite the half-hour detour we took, and I just didn’t notice? What if she sees me again and recognizes me? My throat tightens. I push the heels of my hands into my eyes and focus on breathing. Fear hates action. It’s your voice in my head, stopping my breath. Stare it in the face. Splints shifts his head onto my lap. I think of that lady’s face, as she stood in her nice garden with her expensive-looking bike, expecting I’d answer her questions. Splints huffs a breath onto my fingers and twitches his eyebrows at me.

I tip more Winter Warmer into the vaporizers and pull on my boots. Splinter doesn’t have to be asked twice.

We go back in the dark. The snail fits snugly in my pocket. We take one of her chairs too. I leave the cushion, though, sitting on her front mat.

DAY 29

SUNDAY

WE’RE UP EARLY. Out on the front porch, I take a small hanging pot from my backpack and carefully repack the soil in around the plant. It has long tendrils with leaves like pale beads. The old lady from next door is already on her porch. She’s sitting on a chair with her back to us, pretending she’s not watching me reflected in her window. As soon as we go in, she’ll be peering over the fence to have a look. Funny old goat, you called her. A whole life we know nothing about. Nosy old goat, more like.

I ignore her inquisitive back and stand on my stolen chair to hang my new pot from the iron lacework. The spilled soil brushes off the little cushion easily as I pull it from the bottom of the bag. I give it a shake and place it on the chair. That’s two odd chairs and two mismatched cushions now. And a few pots. And a wire bird on a stake. And an iron snail with a real shell. I step back and look at it all.

It looks . . . deliberate, rather than randomly collected from all over the place. Like one of those cafés where none of the chairs are the same. It looks like a lived-in house now. I arrange the chairs to give them that we’ve just stepped away look. A loved house. I think about that show I watched late at night in the first week you were gone, Funeral Directors of Ohio. How they painted the faces of dead people to make them look alive.

DAY 30

MONDAY

AWAKE AGAIN. TV news in my ears again. Bombs and death. I lift my head and press mute.