I reel, physically. God knows it doesn’t take much to bowl me over right now, but Jo’s never spoken this way to me before. Even now I can see her spooling her anger back in, reassembling it in her head into something more palatable, but I’m not sure I want her to. I’m angry too.

I want to scream with rage, at this place for doing this to us, at all of them for fucking accepting it for millennia, just taking the hit and expecting me to do the same. I’m mad at Jo. Step up, she says. Under these circumstances.

I’m mad that I’m apparently the weakest person here. At my mother, my sister for making me this way, at Hugh for leaving me out here alone, but mostly I am sick to death of myself, my fear, my inaction.

Something in me has got to die today.

“I’m sorry,” Jo says, eyes closed. She can’t look at me and say it.

“No.” I cross my arms, tight, tight. “You’re right.”

“I’m blaming you for things that are not your fault. He should be doing this, is the truth. That’s the tradition. He should be doing a lot of things.”

I can do it, though. I can do more.

I peer back up at the window. Hugh’s not framed there anymore, but that certainly doesn’t mean he’s on his way down here. I picture him filling the leather chair in the corner of his study, his knuckles curled white around the metal studs in the arms. Maybe that old box of photographs is in his lap and he’s doing what Matthew was doing this morning, staring down at the faces of ghosts.

“I’ll speak to him,” I say. “Even if he won’t go, he can give me a script, anything he picked up from his—”

Jo interrupts with a rasping laugh. “More likely, he’ll wind up convincing you not to go, and then where will we be?”

As insulted as I feel about the picture she paints of me, she’s right again. If I go up there, he’ll do everything he can to lock the door behind me. And I don’t know how much energy I have left to stand up to him.

Right now, the front door hangs wide open. From inside the foyer, I hear the clock chiming the half hour. So much time left in the Day and only four gone.

Only four gone. Jesus, listen to me.

Jo waves to someone over my shoulder. I turn to see Matthew standing on the gravel drive, not one toe touching the green of the property. He looks like he’s only staying awake through sheer force of will.

“Matthew can walk you over, help you decide what to say,” Jo says. “He’s good with words.”