Bryde smiled faintly. He was a party of one. From mystery to mystery, that was where he was headed. Saving the ley lines.

“Speaking of calls, how did your call to the fam go?” Hennessy asked Ronan. “They doing well, keeping up your garden while you’re gone?”

Ronan said, “Please shut up.”

“As you pointed out already, my to-call list is shorter. Girls, dead. Mum, well, you know her, you met her,” Hennessy said. “In my dreams. About forty times. J. H. Hennessy, that portrait artist you might have heard of, collected, bid upon. Known best for her final self-portrait, entitled Brains on a Wall. Don’t have to call her, either. Now, you haven’t met the other one, Bill Dower, dear old dad, the one who dropped his seed into the ocean to make it boil. What! you’re thinking, what’s he doing in Pennsylvania, hateful Pennsylvania, in a story told with this accent? Well, Bill Dower came from Pennsylvania, and to Pennsylvania he returned after Brains on a Wall. I think he gave up the whole seeds-and-oceans thing, though.”

“And you said I had daddy issues,” Ronan scoffed.

“They’re like chicken pox,” she said. “More than one person can have them at a time.”

She didn’t say whether or not she’d called Jordan, and Ronan didn’t ask. The truth was that in the broad light of day, the phones did seem to belong to a different kind of life, one they didn’t live in anymore. Calling Declan had made Ronan feel more unmoored, not less.

“Your exit,” Bryde said, “is here.”

“And what is our destination?” Hennessy said. “You’re being even more ‘mysterious stranger’ than usual. Is it more French fries?”

“You said we could stand to add another dreamer, so I found one.”

Ronan snapped to attention. “You what?”

“I thought about the suggestion and decided Hennessy was right,” Bryde said.

“I was joking,” Hennessy said. “Do they have jokes where you come from? Jokes are concepts presented in a way to shock or delight because of exaggeration or, sometimes, subversion of cultural norms. There are ha-ha bits at the end of them.”

Bryde smiled thinly at her. “Ha-ha. We will have to be watchful. This is a dangerous place.”

It didn’t look dangerous. It was a treeless rural valley, objectively beautiful, the long-frostbitten fields rolling off toward a distant line of low mountains. The only sign of civilization was a fine old stone mansion and a massive commercial turkey house, the sort that housed thirty thousand birds who never saw daylight.

And somewhere in this place was another dreamer.

“This is quaint,” Bryde said as they pulled up in front of the mansion.

Hennessy growled, “Too bad it’s Pennsylvania.”