Ayanna’s grandmother sitting at the table, opening the bills and taking Antony’s debit card from his leather wallet, her grandmother talking to the police officers in the station, on the phone, her grandmother telling her she needed to get ready to go back to school, her grandmother telling her that she could talk to her, her grandmother saying the words mental health advocate like it was a new technology she had never heard of before, her grandmother suggesting she call some friends and go out, her grandmother trying to pass a soccer ball to Ayanna and the ball instead hitting the shed with a loud, satisfying thunk, her grandmother doing dishes and crying and then saying she always cried while doing dishes, that’s how much she hated doing ’em, why haven’t you noticed before, her grandmother telling Ayanna they should go get her hair braided for the school year.

Grief time was different. Dinner was sometimes at four in the afternoon, at midnight, never. Mundane things—scrubbing the shower, weeding the garden, making toast—were hills to trudge up. Time never made sense. Ayanna would sit in her room and think she had been crying for hours to find out it had only been three minutes. Conversations would take hours but when Ayanna reflected on it later, only five minutes’ worth of information had been said. How could it take her hours to say, “it hurts”? Ayanna’s brain was sinkholing with it; even thinking Olivia’s name plunged her elsewhere sometimes.

Every night, Ayanna told herself in her too-cold bedroom the door would open again to the blue grass and blue sky, Olivia would be there at the entrance. Everything would be fixed. She would no longer be alone. Ayanna had written out a long apology to Olivia. She would take her to dinner, would buy her ice cream, rub her sister’s feet. She would do what Olivia wanted and go to the same college as her and they would be roommates. They would eat breakfast together almost every morning and study at night in the same bed.

On a Sunday night, the door opened to somewhere new for the first time since that day. A swamp with squat pink trees and long trailing branches, orange water, and what looked like lily pads made of bronze, each the same as the other. A month ago, Ayanna thought, what a thrill it would have been to see this. She lifted her head, stopped slumping. This one, it had a smell too. Like rotting pumpkins mixed with fresh-cut grass. The sky, a true black. It seemed as if all the light Ayanna could see was coming instead from the water. One of the trees closest to the entrance was covered in fuzzy green fruits.