When Izzy woke, Leanne was there, peering myopically into her eyes over a large stuffed black cat. It resembled, in a perverse way, the kitten Izzy had rescued from the dump as a child. The one that she’d found hanging dead on the clothesline the next morning.

“You still alive, girl?”

Izzy wasn’t so sure. She noticed that the sunflowers were gone. How long had she slept? Had Seth really been there at all?

“I brought tea.” Leanne gestured to a bedside table set with three chipped china cups and a broken teapot. “For us and Kitty.”

“Thanks.” Izzy wanted that thing gone. It looked unsanitary. How had Leanne even gotten it in here?

Leanne poured some water from the teapot, added a straw, and held out the cup to Izzy. She tried to sit up but everything hurt. “I have to go find him. Where’s my phone?”

Leanne wrinkled her forehead. “You can’t go anywhere; you have to heal. The doctor said you could scar real bad.” Izzy’s mother had a mirror, a round one with a plastic handle that looked like bone, and she held it up for Izzy to see. A person she didn’t recognize looked back at her. One eye was black with coagulated blood, the upper lip swollen. A large bandage covered the nose and one side of the face.

“You fell and hit your head outside the mine shaft. Hurt your ankle, too. A ranger found you. Your dog’s okay. And that tortoise you like. Foot.”

“What about Cyrus?” Izzy asked again. Then: “I found something. I found—”

Leanne poured water into the third teacup and set it down in front of the stuffed cat. Some water had spilled—the teacup spout had broken off. When Leanne looked up at Izzy, her eyes were red, and she sounded more lucid than Izzy had ever heard her. “What you found—they said it could be him. They’re not sure.”

It was him. His hand. His ring. It was him.

Izzy opened her mouth, but no sound came out.

Instead, the desert whirled its sands and shook dry leaves with woe. Dead sea waters moaned. Jackrabbits and roadrunners screamed in pain. Cracking fault lines rummaged deeper through the earth. Leanne’s mermaid mannequin sobbed, lonely in her dried-up plastic pool.

To Bring You My Love

To Bring You My Love

Izzy could not remember much of what happened next. She’d talked to the police, who’d taken a report. Someone—Izzy wasn’t sure who—had confirmed that there would be an investigation, a forensics report, that the thing she’d found was a man’s severed hand; she had bent over and retched in the dirt. Dismembered. The horror of it struck her again like a blow to the throat. Like that blow to her head when she’d fallen outside the mine.