Hennessy thought secrets were like that. Each of her girls started life as Hennessy, thinking like her, acting like her—but eventually something happened, and they got a secret. And that was when they became their own person.

It was possible Hennessy believed people simply were their secrets.

J. H. Hennessy’s secret was that she could only love one person at a time. It might appear as if she loved other people, like her daughter, or other activities, like painting, but she really only loved Bill Dower. Everything went well for painting and for Hennessy as long as everything was going well with Bill Dower. But if it wasn’t, anything could be sacrificed in the service of preserving that love. Daughter, career, friends, house—these were just well-treated pawns in a board game with only two players.

Jordan’s secret was that she wanted to live apart from Hennessy. She might have denied this to save Hennessy’s feelings, but Hennessy had followed her; she’d seen the apartments Jordan daydreamed about. She’d looked through Jordan’s phone as she slept and seen the zip codes she fantasized over. She knew the galleries Jordan ogled, she knew the schools Jordan pictured herself attending. No matter how exciting Hennessy made their lives, no matter how many high-end jobs she had them take, how many lowbrow parties she had them attend, how big she made their shared life, Jordan still wanted her own. No one wanted to live with Hennessy forever, not even Hennessy.

Hennessy’s secret was that she didn’t want the ley line to get any more powerful.

“When one engages in havoc all the time,” Hennessy said, “it becomes a kind of unhavoc.”

The three dreamers were in an older neighborhood. Hennessy had long since lost sense of where. City and state were all negotiable. The light was peculiar and yellow-green. It was the end of the day, which ordinarily made ugly places more paintable. But tonight the clouds were hanging low and wrong over this town, raggedly caught on telephone wires, and the last of the dying sun came in sideways and murky. Snow was drifting down here and there as if the clouds were sloughing. The streets were muddy with fallen and melted snow and sand.

It was ugly. Unpaintably ugly.

Hennessy went on. “The very act of disruption instead becomes the opposite, ruption, the act of maintaining the status quo, because the status quo has now become chaos. Now, if one wants to prove themselves a game changer, they instead must restore order. What a mindfuck! To—”

“Are you saying that you need a break after this?” Bryde interrupted.

“I was making some psychological observations. As conversation. To fill the time.”

“What do you feel?” Bryde asked.