She had asked him to always tell her where he was going because of her attachment issues. In psychology, attachment referred to how children bonded to their parents—securely, anxiously, avoidant if they didn’t bond. Izzy was anxiously attached; Cyrus was avoidant, but they kept trying to make up for it with each other. Izzy always told herself that if they had a baby, they’d do attachment right.

It seemed especially odd that he’d left his cell phone—Cyrus never went anywhere without it, in part to help make them both feel more secure. She picked up the phone; she knew the code—a combination of their birthdays: 113128—but she’d never had to use it before. When she entered the numbers, the phone remained locked.

Izzy pulled on jeans and jammed her bare feet into her Converse, pocketed her own phone, and went back outside. In the three-sisters garden, the pumpkins lolled like decapitated heads. And Cyrus had hung from the gate, among the orange and black skull lights and Dias de los Muertos masks, a black-caped ghoul holding its head in its arms. Izzy thought of a word she’d just learned—cephalophore—which referred to statues of saints carrying their decapitated heads this way. The ghoul’s held head watched Izzy while she checked around in the dirt for footprints or tracks. Nothing. She took out her phone and texted Nephy and Seth, who didn’t respond, then called Ted at the 29 Palms Inn.

“Hey, Ted, it’s Izzy. You heard from Cyrus?”

“No, ma’am. Why?”

In the background, a woman’s voice howled about Lucifer over the chords of a piano. Ted had turned Izzy and Cyrus on to the music they now loved. Their boss had been in bands in the eighties, his face powdered Kabuki-white, his eyes lined with black, hair bleached and teased. In one picture, he lay sprawled in a pile of men and women who looked just like him. In the nineties, he’d grown his hair out, sported a goatee, wore flannel, changed bands. He’d moved from LA to “escape the madness” and now ran the inn.

“He’s not here,” Izzy said.

“Probably went for a walk. Or to the store.”

Not after the way we kissed last night, she thought, but didn’t say. Cyrus would have slept in, made her some pancakes, melting butter in the pan and pouring batter into the shapes of animals, flowers, and sizzling hearts.

“Maybe he’s at a site?”

“His truck’s still here. And his phone. He always takes his phone.” She didn’t mention the socks.

“Did you check it?”

She didn’t answer. Maybe she’d forgotten the code.

Ted’s voice frowned through the phone. “Did anything happen?”

What could have happened? They’d listened to music, cooked, and eaten; they’d talked and made love. And made lotus love. Everything like always. But now Cyrus and his boots were gone. His clothes from the night before and the ID he kept in his jeans. The silver band he wore on his ring finger. All gone. His truck and keys and cell phone and socks—still there. And this weight repeatedly fell from her throat to her chest to her stomach.