“Remember the ghost stories you used to scare me with?”

In order to appease the ghost, the man had to fast in a dark room, leaving only to make daily offerings to the ghost. Food, clothing, objects, and finally body parts—a hand, an eye, a kidney. But nothing appeased the ghost and the man soon died.

“I recall you liked stories,” Larry said.

“I couldn’t sleep. I’d wake screaming in the night. Remember the pocket knife?”

Larry scratched his whiskered chin. “Made you brave in the end.”

“Remember how you joined a cult and had sex with the leader and—oh, yeah—brought a baby home and told Leanne she had to raise her?”

He coughed into his fist—she thought she could hear the dust and smoke in his lungs.

“Remember the kitten?” she said.

“That cat incident had nothing to do with me—”

“Right. That’s what you’ve told me for almost twenty years. Who else could it have been, Larry?”

“Seth,” he said.

“What?”

“I caught him throwing rocks at roadrunners, things like that. I had some concerns at the time. But I figured it was mostly harmless.”

“You knew that? Hurt animals? Like nascent serial killer shit?”

“I didn’t know for sure. Still don’t, but with everything that happened…I do know it wasn’t me.”

“You never fucking told me that you thought he killed my cat.”

“Stop,” Leanne said. “Izzy, stop.”

Aurora took a breath. Anger would no longer serve her now. “These are your grandchildren, Larry. You get to see them this once. And I never want you coming near them the rest of your life.”

She turned and walked back to the car, took the children out of the carrier, and buckled them into their car seats.

Then she drove away from that trailer for the last time.

◆◆◆

Aurora stopped at Nephy’s, then. But the pink house had been boarded up. Her sister was gone.

“You’re mine forever now,” she told Jack. “And I am yours.”

◆◆◆

Clouds floated lotus-like in the lake of the sky. Aurora looked out at the Salton Sea reflecting the sun like the polished copper or bronze of an ancient mirror, with a handle carved of bone, she thought, in the shape of a goddess.

But there was no goddess, no resurrected god. Nothing had changed. Like Sky had said: the ice was melting, the forests burning, the animals dying. The denial, the fear, the brutality. The Johns, the Janes, the Baby Does. Cyrus’s death had meant nothing. The world would still come to an end from man’s doing. And if she were still alive by then, she might have to face the end alone.

Ever might not come today.

But—the babies. She had them now.