After all the packing, preparation and anxiety over the final details (Fitz’s anxiety, in particular, which seemed to build on itself with every item they stuffed into the trailer), the drive was a lark. Nobody got a flat tire, nobody got lost, and when they stopped for gas or a burger, they rolled into the parking lot like a traveling show, everybody on the same page, on the same team, and it was group mind that decided when everybody’s stomach started rumbling or bladder sent out its urgent signals to the brain. They were together in body and spirit, that was how it was, they were off on a grand adventure and nothing could stop them now. She was so excited she couldn’t seem to stop talking the whole way there, high on the trip and the marijuana too. Every hill and signpost seemed to remind her of something else, especially as they crossed the New York State line and took the Taconic south through the densely forested hills that were just beginning to show the first flames of fall color.

Her recollections of Millbrook were vague—she and Fitz might have visited it two or three times over the years, just to get out of the house for a Sunday drive and maybe stop for a sandwich at the diner there or a drink or two at the bar—but what she remembered, what she could see with her eyes closed, was the charm of the place, a prosperous little village of no more than maybe sixteen or seventeen hundred people that could have been set down in the Adirondacks or New Hampshire without anybody blinking an eye. Was there anything to do there? No. It was just a village, with a junior college for girls and not much else. If you wanted culture—or even a pair of shoes—you could buzz into Poughkeepsie, for what it was worth, but Manhattan was only two hours away if you really got desperate.

Of course, that wasn’t the point. The point was to get away from everything and everybody and indulge what Tim called the Fifth Freedom, the freedom to explore your own mind without harassment or disapproval or even the knowledge of the outside world. Without the squares. The unenlightened. The mass of people who lived lives of quiet desperation and never suspected there was anything beyond work and sleep and what their blinkered senses brought them in a continuous loop from birth till death. But that wasn’t her, not anymore. Or Fitz either.

The first thing you saw as you turned onto Franklin Avenue, Millbrook’s main street, was a great towering five-story wooden structure straddling a hill in a sea of fussed-over lawns and flowerbeds. It was grim, institutional, and looked utterly out of place amid the farms and fields surrounding it. “What’s that?” Corey asked from the backseat.