She didn’t wake until late the next afternoon, Dog nosing her neck, licking her cheek. Nephy had left a note saying she’d check in later. Izzy got up and looked in the mirror, gingerly removed the bandage from her face. The reflection in the mirror did not disturb her, not really, in spite of the small, round artifact of the head, the black eye, the raised and painful gash across the bridge of the nose and the cheek. The scar was only a reflection of her inner cicatrix. This was the mark that branded her as the one who had lost her beloved.

Izzy had been raised in a dead place, found Cyrus, devoted her life to him. She had awakened one morning to find him gone. She’d searched for him, given up, and found a dog and a man who looked like him. She’d returned and shaved her head like a warrior, like a penitent, and entered the mines alone. Down in those mines, she’d feared that Cyrus was dead. But even still, she’d refused to accept that he was really gone.

Her lover, her companion, the man who had rescued her from her childhood, had been murdered. The man with whom she had conceived and then lost a child. The man with whom she had hoped to conceive a child once again. A child with Cyrus’s deep eyes and full mouth and deft hands.

Hands.

Cyrus’s hand.

That had built things. That had fixed things. That had touched her with love.

But now there was no Cyrus; there would be no child. Even if he had loved someone else, there was now no chance of reconciliation. The loss had changed her into someone else. Though she knew even then that it would take her a long time to fully exhume the person she had become.

She popped a Percocet and left the bathroom, almost stumbling over Yard who looked up at her beadily, as if to say, What now? Ignoring him and Dog, too weak to even reach down and stroke the tortoise’s shell or the dog’s smooth, bony back, Izzy stood blinking around the room. Her eyes rested on the mannequin Leanne had given her.

Izzy lit some white candles. She stoppered the tin bathtub and filled it with water from the pipes Cyrus had installed. She took the mannequin and lowered him into the tub, arranged the stiff limbs so that they fit. She ran the water over the plastic body with its strange planes and flat beige curves, then rinsed it away.

What was she doing? She didn’t know. But she felt she must not stop.