“Isabelle!” he calls after her as she runs through the lobby. Stop, she is thinking, willing it as she’s never willed anything before—the shadow away, or Maggie’s health—summoning up all and any powers she might have, even if it means she’ll use them up forever. Stop! She rushes to the end of the front room, where she’ll turn a corner and at the end of the hallway either will or will not see her father standing there still waiting for the elevator, where she’ll know whether or not she is too late. Her sneakers squeal against the marble as she takes the turn, and she can just see her father’s heel following the rest of him into the elevator, and she knows she will not make it there in time, the doors will close and the elevator will rise without her, and her father will be alone upstairs with Jimmy, and if anything happens it will be her fault, it will be because she did not make it there in time. She can hear the elevator hum as it gears up to shut its old doors and take her father away, and she staggers again over her laces, cannot quite catch herself, falls, and “Dad!” she cries.

And she is gone. Not gone: but above it all, looking down. She sees herself on the lobby floor, a growing puddle of bright red blood on the tiles. She sees herself bring a hand to her nose; she watches the blood drip down her fingers, roll down her wrist and into her sleeve. She sees the books from her backpack scattered around her, and suddenly she is in her father’s old bedroom again, putting her books into her backpack when her mother comes to tell her that the cousins have arrived, slinging her backpack on before it is zipped and following her downstairs, and her backpack is unzipped in the hall as they eat Yorkshire pudding and roast beef, and it is unzipped in the car as they drive home, and it is unzipped as she runs through the lobby and crashes to the tiles, but it is only now, as the blood from her nose seeps into the cuff of her sweater and the books lie all around her, that she realizes that it has been unzipped all this time.

She sees her father’s foot caught cartoonlike in the elevator door, holding it open, and she can hear the confused shifting of the elevator’s gears; she sees her father’s hands prying open the door, and then she sees him kneeling before her, his head from above a funny lump on the platter of his shoulders, and he is pulling away the hand she’s put to her nose, asking her, Does it hurt? Does it hurt?