She negotiates her way past the kissing gate, using the opportunity to look back through the churchyard. She sees no one, but she can’t shake the feeling there’s someone there. Someone watching. She crosses the road and makes her way up the path to the cottage. As she steps through the gate she suddenly feels blissfully, inexplicably happy. Everything seems distant and fuzzy, as though the events of the day happened to someone else. She is home. She is safe.

She pushes down on the handle of the front door and finds it locked. It’s nighttime; of course it’s locked. But something is wrong. She can feel it. She reaches into her purse for her keys but can’t find them. Her mother has joined her now. Hurry up, Lillian, what will the neighbors think? They’re hardly likely to be watching at this hour. Why is she here? What use is she in a crisis? Edna is the one who always knows what to do. It’s Edna she needs. It always has been. Edna!

Lily drops the purse and runs down the path to the back door, a snail cracking underfoot as she turns into the garden. The back door is unlocked, and this alarms her even more than the locked front door. She steps into the trapped heat of the conservatory, clambering past all the folded-up garden furniture. A wasp batters drowsily at the plastic roof. She steps into the living room.

Here is Edna. Facedown on the carpet. She has fallen forward into the fireplace, and the coals form a reddish halo around her head. The room smells of burned hair and makes Lily think of freshly chopped fingernails. She falls forward onto her knees and lets out the oddest noise—a sort of strangled, keening note. Edna’s lumpy body is heavy and stubborn but she pushes on one arm, gets her up, turns her over. The coals shift and spill, the fire flaring back to life until Edna’s head comes to rest once more in the embers. The orange glow of the firelight pulses in its charcoal prison. The heat licks at Edna’s hair, causing it to blacken and curl, the smoke launching heavenward in a sweet, sickly incense.

Edna.

The right side of her face remains largely untouched, just a brush of soot like she’s been up the chimney. But the left . . . The left is a half-mask of black and red ruin, her dentures lying half exposed and melted, her hair—that wispy, half-dead hair that she coveted so—is gone, exposing the scarred pink dome of Edna’s skull. The eye is the worst, though. The left eye. Sitting loosely in its socket, a bubbling, hissing mess of milky jelly. There’s no chance this eye can see anything anymore, and yet it looks straight into Lily’s heart.

She backs away and sits down heavily in the armchair.

You have to ring for help, says an echo somewhere behind her. Edna always knows what to do.

Call Oscar, Edna says.