I went to my mother’s room. I’m not sure what I thought would be in there. I don’t know why I wanted to go into the room, and sit on the bed, and then lie down. The bed was bare, stripped of its sheets. But still it was soft, and the pillows comfortable, and the faint sweet smell of dust and sandalwood rose all around me. I felt for a moment as though I were floating—my body adrift in some ocean. Maybe, I thought with a start, this isn’t my body at all, maybe this is somehow her body, my mother’s—wasted and almost ready to die, giving in to the pull of its mortality.

I looked up and saw Cole in the hall. He’d followed me there. He came close and sat on the bed. I held my breath. His hands rested on the bed beside me. I saw a scratch on his hand, just beneath the thumb. I saw one fingernail was jagged, as if he’d torn it off.

“Hello, pretty,” he said. I tensed, thought of the girl in the bed. “I’m glad you came back,” he said.

“It’s my home,” I said.

“You know what I mean.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Listen,” he said, softly, urgently. “We can find a way to be together without hurting Lucas. We can have all of this.”

He took my limp hand and held it. He pulled it to his face and pressed his mouth against it. He put my fingertips between his teeth, and I let him. I thought about him holding hands with Emily. Eating breakfast with Emily at a corner diner. I imagined her body full of him on some expanse of sand somewhere. She must have loved him, I thought. I bet she loved him so much.

“I want to make you happy,” he said to me. “I want to keep you safe, and happy. You and Lucas both. I’ll find a way for us to be together.”

Mom, I thought, help me. But I knew she couldn’t. Then I thought, I will say his name, I will say it over and over, like a protective chant. I’ll say it in my sleep.

“Cole,” I said. “What do you really want? What do you want from us? Why us?”

Cole shook his head. “You think it’s some big mystery. But there’s nothing mysterious about what I want. I want to be home,” he said.

Both our bodies sank into the mattress now. My heart was clumsy, flapping around in my chest. I felt a weight on my ungainly heart. It was all elbows and knees in there. Beneath, between, inside my body, my mother’s body shifted a little and settled more firmly into place. She liked all this. She loved a ghost, she loved a stranger, she loved the dead.