I go back over it, but I can never reconstruct exactly why we didn’t leave the next day. The acid is the excuse, but it’s not enough. Sandy felt bad, I’m sure about that: it hit her hard when she mixed acid and alcohol, and she’d been doing it all night. But Sandy didn’t matter: the ones who had to get out of the country were Juan, Stephen, Laura, and me. Our frantic search of the house had lasted a lot longer than we thought: even Juan woke up after noon. We hadn’t packed our suitcases. The bodyguards reassured us: there was no one on the property, there was no danger. This was one of the poshest streets in London, we lived surrounded by rich and famous neighbors who had security of their own. An intruder would have been detected. We were hungry, so Susie and Tara threw together some spaghetti, and somehow the mood changed. We were young. We started to remember the previous night as a bad trip, the ghost of the Order’s lost son, the one we, somehow, had avoided becoming. Though as Eddie said in his letter: all the Order’s children have their scars.

We spent the afternoon sprawled on cushions and rugs, as always, drinking wine to calm our nerves because weed might turn us paranoid again. We did nothing but lounge around the house, listen to the storm, jump at claps of thunder. We packed our suitcases with abnormal slowness, or at least that’s how I remember it. I spent hours deciding whether to bring one or two saris, for example, and I never wear saris. Genesis made tea and we ate a gooseberry pie that the cook had left for us. The storm was intense and we convinced ourselves it was impossible to go out in weather like that; we were sure, too, that the ferry wouldn’t be able to leave the dock. None of our friends left, either. As if something was keeping them from going.

Genesis and Crimson embraced under a blanket and were the first to go to sleep. The others withdrew one by one: they yawned, stretched, said the stress of the night before had left them exhausted. Stephen said we could go anyway, the four of us, and leave them there, but he didn’t seem very enthusiastic. I was the one who gave the last word: It’ll be better if we leave when it stops raining. Tomorrow morning. Early, he said. Very early, I replied. I’ll set the alarm for six.

I let Juan take me in his arms. There was a smell of wine and earth on his hands and his breath. I kissed him, but we didn’t have sex that night. We fell asleep under a white Afghan blanket that I can’t forget, and still dream about.