“With my grief,” Amanda said.

Grief, yes. Everyone had so much grief.

Izzy nodded and brought out another flyer. “I wanted to ask you… Does this man look familiar?”

“No, but he looks a little like that guy over there.”

Izzy turned.

A tall man, shoulders so broad they further narrowed his waist and hips. His black hair had been slicked back wetly from his wide face with its dark eyes, and he wore a long-sleeved black hoodie and black jeans. Black Converse. Her breath caught and her heart lifted, then fell in her chest. He reminded her of Cyrus. Maybe too much. Why hadn’t she noticed him before? Had he just arrived?

He nodded his head at her.

Maybe she would stay a little longer.

◆◆◆

Evening came, pink, then blue. The house had been lit with white tapers and votive candles, and the guests sat around on cushions, facing Sky. Izzy and Dog, with his head on her thigh, sat beside Amanda, who had left her child upstairs with a nanny. The man who resembled Cyrus stood behind them, leaning against the wall. Izzy imagined she could feel his eyes on the back of her neck—a warm sensation, not unpleasant.

“Tonight we are going to discuss chaos,” Sky said. “Our whole world is a tomb ravened by chaos. Think of global warming, ice floes melting, the destruction of coral reefs and the extinct or near-extinct species. We’ve become so out of touch with the earth, with anything of meaning.”

Izzy remembered, with a twinge of anxiety, the words of the red-haired horror movie children at Bombay Beach: Passenger pigeon, Pyrenean ibex, Tasmanian tiger, Tecopa pupfish, West African rhino.

“Even these recent fires scorching the earth, burning the paws off of bears, killing horses and mountain lions, destroying everything in the wake of the flame.” Sky shut her eyes and winced. “I mean, the president says there’s no such thing as global warming! Have you seen those fires? They’ve had to evacuate.

“Think of the horrors of war, violence, poverty, and disease,” Sky went on. “Sixty-five million displaced people around the globe. Nuclear proliferation. A man without conscience or humanity who denies these travesties running this country.”

The night he’d been elected, Izzy and Cyrus went through all the stages of grief. And then they had gone through these stages again and again with each new political development, until Cyrus’s vanishing obliterated everything else. How had he not realized that his leaving—his betrayal—would obliterate everything? That she would feel a grief worse than any she had ever known? Maybe he had realized…

“These are facts of our times, and we can’t ignore them,” Sky went on. “We must acknowledge chaos. You’ve all heard of the idea of embracing the Shadow? He can’t be neglected.”

She moved her hands when she talked, and Izzy saw the quiver of silver chains between Sky’s rings and the bracelets on her wrists.

“The word paradise. It means an enclosed garden.” Sky gestured around now with her glittering fingers, as if writing invisible symbols in the air. “This is where our attraction to courtyards might originally come from. The enclosed garden, the courtyard, the womb.