She stared at me blankly, then returned to Wallis. “I wish I could take away some of your pain, darling,” she said. “I know how much you love him.”

“That’s not helpful, Cricket,” I said.

Cricket released Wallis’s hand and, without preamble, got up and escorted me from the bedroom by the elbow. Once we were out of earshot, she wheeled on me. “You can’t snap at her like that, Daisy. She needs to wallow. She also needs you to allow it.”

Frustrated, I threw up my arms. “I can’t just sit here—”

Cricket stopped me. “No one is asking you to. But Wallis isn’t like you. She can’t just keep busy and forget about it.”

If only I could forget: about Atlas’s text, entrenched in my phone: Stealing seems to have started with your college tuition. There was not enough busywork in the bureaucracy to make me forget those words. They had set up camp in my brain. The tent was pitched, the fire lit. For more than a day it had been blazing, and I still couldn’t figure out how to respond to this news, and to Atlas himself, who was waiting on my response. Cricket sensed me spiraling, I think, because though she still held my elbow, she’d softened her grip.

“I’m not busy, Cricket. Not anymore. So how am I supposed to deal with everything now?” I closed my eyes. My mother chanted my name. Daisy. Daisy. Daisy. Then we were on the couch, and she was telling me to breathe deeply. I obeyed, but the task was harder than it should’ve been. I had to consciously remind myself that panic was impractical. When I felt more stable, I opened my eyes. Across from us were my father’s same old wing chairs. But the walls—no longer psych ward white. “Cricket,” I said. “The walls are blue.”

“Delicious color, isn’t it?” She admired the room. “I got the paint at the resale shop. Took a gallon and most of the day. And I only ruined one pair of shoes.”

“You did this?”

“Yes, Daisy, I painted a few walls. They say, change your wall color, change your life. Right?”

“Change your hair,” I said, smiling at the idea of Cricket acclimating to this apartment. “Change your life.”

“Well, I like my hair currently,” she said, tossing it back. “So, walls it was.”

“I like it,” I said.

“That’s a relief. Now, Daisy, you and I both know that Wallis will be fine. But if you tell her she will, she will insist she won’t. This is one of the earliest lessons I learned as a mother.”

“Reverse psychology?”

“No,” Cricket said, bemused. “Just backing the hell up.”