“What the hell was that?” she said to Buttons. The beagle opened one eye but offered no advice. He rarely did.

Kate massaged her back. It felt as if she’d been kicked, and then burned with a lit cigar. She couldn’t stop shivering.

She wrapped the sheet around her and padded to the bathroom to find the thermometer. She took her temperature while she sat on the closed toilet, the soreness and cold dissipating. After two minutes, she checked the thermometer and smiled.

“It worked.”

Her temp was back to normal.

And now she was exhausted.

She went back to bed in the living room, thinking she’d take a quick nap before Andrew came home. She couldn’t wait to tell him her fever had broken.

That was one powerful meditation, she thought, snuggling in the bed. I won’t tell him that part. He thinks it’s all a crock of shit anyway. He’ll say it was the Tylenol he left for me. Who knows, maybe he’s right. But what the hell was up with that session?

When the door opened, startling her, she was shocked to see that it was almost four o’clock.

“Hey, you’re awake,” Andrew said, both hands filled with multiple plastic bags.

“I guess I am.” She didn’t remember falling asleep, but it also didn’t feel like she’d just been lying there thinking about what had happened for three hours. She was more tired now than she’d been before she’d come back to bed.

“Sorry it took so long. I did a little exploring, not that there’s a whole lot to see. Then I found this used bookstore and got really lost. Hold on.”

Her knees popped when she got up to walk to the kitchen. She had to settle into a chair before she fell.

He came back with a paper sack full of books and put it on the counter in front of her.

“Guess how much these cost?”

She looked inside the bag, turning the mildewed paperback books over to look at the covers. Most of them were old crime novels, with some science fiction and courtroom dramas thrown in.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Twenty bucks?”

“Try five.”

“But there have to be at least thirty books in here.”

He started unpacking the bags, canned food, bread, and boxes of macaroni filling the counter space.

“I know. You buy the bag for five bucks and fill it to the brim. I have enough reading material to keep me going for the summer.”

Kate sneezed again and again until she was gasping for air.

“I think they’re a little too moldy for my taste,” she said.