“Mom didn’t move back because of me,” Claire said, as if surprised Sydney thought that. “She moved back so you could be born here.”

“She left when I was six,” Sydney said as she went to the open door to the sunroom porch and looked out. “If it weren’t for those photographs of Mom Grandma gave me, I wouldn’t even remember what she looked like. If I meant something to her, she wouldn’t have left.”

“What did you do with those photos?” Claire asked. “I’d forgotten about them.”

One moment Sydney was tilting her head and taking a deep breath of the herbs drying on the porch, the next moment she was blown out the door, transported on the wind back to Seattle. She landed in the living room of the town house, staring at the couch. She walked to it and lifted one side. There under the couch was an envelope marked Mom. It had been so long since she’d felt like looking at the photos that she’d forgotten they were there. These were photos of Lorelei’s life on the road, a life Sydney had tried to emulate for so long. She took the envelope and leafed through the stack of photos, and she found one that made her head want to explode with fear. There was her mother, maybe eighteen years old, standing in front of the Alamo. She was smiling and holding a handmade sign that read No More Bascom! North Carolina Stinks! When Sydney was a teenager, she thought it was the funniest thing. But what if David found the envelope? What if he figured it out? She heard him at the front door. She put the envelope back under the couch quickly. He was coming in. He was going to find her there.

“Sydney?”

Sydney opened her eyes with a start. She was back in Bascom. Claire was beside her, shaking her arm.

“Sydney?”

“I forgot to take them with me,” Sydney said. “The photos. I left them.”

“Are you all right?”

Sydney nodded, trying to get a hold of herself. But she had a bad feeling that David would know she’d been there. He’d know she’d been thinking about something she left behind. She’d opened a door. Even now she thought she could smell his cologne near her, as if she’d brought him back with her. “I’m fine. I was just thinking of Mom.” Sydney shrugged, trying to get rid of the tension in her shoulders. David didn’t know where the photos were.

He wouldn’t find them.

That evening Evanelle put on a short-sleeved robe over her nightgown and walked into her kitchen. She had to step around boxes full of Band-Aids and matches, rubber bands and Christmas ornament hooks. Once in the kitchen, she went searching for microwave popcorn. She pushed aside toasters in their original boxes and aspirin she’d bought in bulk.

She didn’t want any of this stuff, she didn’t even particularly like having it around. She tried to keep it all in corners and unused rooms, but some of it always managed to spill out. One day someone was going to need it, so it was better to have it around than to go looking for it at three in the morning at the all-night Wal-Mart.