At the end of our street we crossed over into the campus, where my mom had been walking the dogs for years. The school was small and quiet—it was a Catholic college, and most of the students were commuters—but the campus was open to the public, and it was actually kind of pretty in a storybook way. The buildings were made of stone with red-shingled roofs, there were ponds filled with ducks and swans, and for several years, sapphire-chested peacocks had wandered the campus, haughty denizens of some lesser royal court. (“Sometimes I think Tabitha got her attitude from them,” my mom had said once.) Ros and I used to collect their feathers when they dropped, along with other treasures we’d found—a cracked blue shell of a robin’s egg, a rock shaped like a heart, and once, the parched white shell of a turtle. I’d clung to these objects—they were still on display in my bedroom, balanced along the top of my bookshelf. They were probably covered in dust now.

“Whatever happened to the peacocks?” I said.

“I don’t know,” my mom said. “Flew away, maybe? Or got eaten.”

That seemed right—another beautiful thing gobbled up, a messy crunch of blood and bones and feathers.

We trotted over the wooden bridge, the dogs keeping their noses low, and past the little outbuilding with the waterwheel.

“We’re excited to come see the show soon,” my mom said.

“Oh—yeah,” I said. “I think… I don’t know. I’m not convinced you should come anymore. We still have a lot of work to do on the costumes. And it might not be any good.”

“Nonsense,” my mom said. “Is Mr. Blade still as charming and conscientious as ever?”

“He is,” I said mournfully. I could have used his sunglasses now, though they were somewhere in the Lily Pad. I doubted, based on where we’d left things, that Oliver would ever want to talk to me again.

“And Ros?”

“I actually haven’t seen that much of Ros,” I said.

“Really?” my mom said. “Aren’t you living in the same room?”

“I mean—technically, yes. But they started dating someone up in Lovesick,” I said, proceeding with caution, not wanting to give my mom too much information, lest she subject me to her take on things, which I wasn’t quite ready to hear yet. “Anyway. They just sort of… started spending all their time there. It was just a little bit at first, but then it was a lot.”

“Oh,” my mom said. “You didn’t mention any of that to me when we talked on the phone.”

I shrugged.

“It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time,” I said.

“Well, that’s nice for Ros. Though I don’t think it’s very nice of them to just abandon you like that.”

“Abandon feels a little strong,” I said. “What are you doing?”