“There’s a passage in the Book of Ezekiel where the prophet Ezekiel has a vision. He sees this valley, filled with old dry bones. So God says to him, okay, Zeke, do the prophecy thing with these bones—tell them that I’m going to give them flesh and make them breathe again. So Ezekiel prophesies to this valley of dried-out bones. Then there’s this giant noise, and the valley starts shaking, and then the bones start fusing together, and their flesh grows back onto them, and the winds blow breath back into them, and then they stand up in the valley, ready to walk.”

Jake’s hands kept waving in the air as he talked, as if he couldn’t tell a story without acting it out. Leora thought of Naomi, allowed herself to think of Naomi, glanced back at the dollhouse, and remembered Naomi—who, as a child, had never been able to talk about their dollhouse without teasing her fingers through the air, as if tracing her vision for their house on the skin of the sky. She looked at Jake again and saw that his hands moved more sloppily, more openly, not at all like Naomi’s. And Naomi, at that moment, for the first time in seven years, felt to her like an old friend, not only a dead friend but just someone she had once loved, and still loved, and missed, yes, but—

“I’m interrupting,” Jake muttered, his hands suddenly falling back to his sides like a puppet whose puppeteer had wandered away. “You were saying something about a store with bones.”

She cleared her throat, trying to remember. “Yes, the bones,” she stuttered, pausing for a moment to make sure she had the details straight. “I want you to find the store where I saw those bones, and meet me there the day after I get back—let’s say around five in the afternoon, before it closes. But not just anywhere in the store. It’s a small place, but I want you to find the thing in that store that interested me the most. I’ll give you a hint—it wasn’t the bones. All right?”

Jake shook her hand for the second time. “Thursday at five in your magical hiding place. See you then,” he said. And then he left.