I finish my beer to approving nods from the men beside the makeshift bar and stare at the gathered party, the people trickling in—Avery’s parents, holding each other by the waist, joining the group, thank goodness—and feel myself overtaken by wonder that any of this was possible in the first place. We live. We remain. We don’t know when it will all end, but right now we breathe and drink and smile and laugh and color printed-out pages and salt the pot and roll around snogging near strangers in gravel lanes, and pour another pint, and breathe and breathe and bear it. And isn’t every day like this, really? We sit on the knife’s edge, enduring this gift for as long as it’s given to us, but this is the first time I’ve fully felt it in my blood, how brief it is. How horribly miraculous.

“Look at you.” Marit slows as she passes me, rubbernecking.

I examine my hand in case I really am glowing, but it looks the same as yesterday.

“You’re a mess,” she says.

I peer down at myself for the first time in hours. Under my shapeless hunter coat, my sundress, the Tavira holiday memento, is streaked with dirt and grass, speckled with drops of blood, like a field of poppies seen from above.

I could change, but no. This feels right.

I’m the Lady of Lute.

6:00 P.M.

“So what are we supposed to do now?” Marit asks, looking around. “Just wait? It’s like a, what do you call it at an airport?”

“A gate.” I try to smile, but I don’t like the analogy. It’s too apt.

Down the drive, I see the mums arriving.

I need to stop calling them that. It’s as bad as thinking of me as “that American.” They’re people, women and mothers, more like me than they are different: Wendy and Jenny and Liz.

I’m glad they’re joining in. Frankly, I’m just glad they’re all still alive.

No more gone, as far as we know. Somebody might have quietly passed away in their home, but I’m not sure who we’re missing. We need a roster, a checklist.

A book. Bound in leather. Names of families, crosses and dots.

That’s what that was. A checklist.

I scroll through my memory, desperate to understand. The Pikes, Ian and Jenny and their two kids on Sunnan—they were a dot, like us, I’m sure of it. Matthew was an X. I didn’t check Jo or Sally, but why would I have? I don’t know what the difference is.

It means something that we’re a dot and Hugh is frightened. The crosses must be safer than the dots.

“You brought it!” Tim Blanchard shouts.