Marie’s house appears on the left, good-witch purple with tall stalky wildflowers and grasses and blossoming creepers all but obscuring the paint job. But the usual prog-rock soundtrack doesn’t greet me, even when I get really close. The doors are closed in all the little white house-shaped houses with gray roofs, and the Psychedelicatessen is shut up tight with a skull-and-crossbones flag hanging over the porch railings. All the cigarette butts and glasses are gone from in front of the Relic. Rose’s grocery looks warm, like she could be inside. I push the door—the bells jingle as I pop my head in—but she’s not there. A few more paces up I see her outside the chapel. Swans are filing in. She must hear me getting closer because she looks up, kind of startled. For a second it seems like she might come down and meet me halfway. But she just frowns at me and shakes her head. So I speed up, running to her outside the chapel, frowning too now, trying to remember what I decided I was going to say, but, fuck me, fuck, I never thought of anything, and when I try to open my mouth, just to say, Please, let me in, please, Rose very quietly says, “Don’t,” and goes inside.

Turning away from the chapel means turning toward the ocean. I close my eyes and let my face fill up with salt, over my cheeks and up my nose and down my throat. Drowning.

When I open my eyes, Mrs. Tyburn is holding out a white handkerchief. “Oh, my lamb. My little lamb without a flock. Lost little lamb.” The handkerchief is soft and has that clean laundry scent I only normally smell when I’m pilfering Lolly’s wardrobe. I want to blow my nose into it but I don’t think I’m supposed to. I try to thank her but I just squeak and sob more when I try. She looks like she gets it, anyway.

“I only have a moment, my dear. The others have assembled and we’re going to start our discussion.”

Do I tell her I can’t go back, that it’s over? That my house is teetering, slipping, that it could be going over as we speak? “Rose says I can’t come.”

“And she speaks for us all when she says that.” Some things can make your bones twist and break, hammers, daggers, bombs, tidal waves. Mrs. Tyburn sees. “We all know how you feel about the Duchess. And we appreciate that it must be difficult for you to lose someone close to you, yet again. A season in hell, a season in hell.”

Her words melt and make me feel more still. The pain that grinds my bones to powder has a name now.