“Why?”

“I’ll tell you when you get here.”

“Tell me now.”

Gran stood solid in front of me. “We’re having those evacuees from the accident staying here after all.”

Gran and I had discussed the possibility a couple days before.

“I thought we’d decided not to.”

“I changed my mind,” Gran said.

Well, I hadn’t changed mine.

“Where are they staying?” I asked. “In the back bedroom?”

Gran nodded, picking up the phone.

My heart beat a little too fast, a little too high in my throat as I climbed the narrow steps from the kitchen to my room. I shrugged my backpack from my shoulder, dropping it on the window seat.

As I clicked on my radio, I heard Gran on the phone downstairs, trying to get through to Red Jackson. Since the accident, getting calls out took time. You used the phone for emergencies, nothing else.

Bayley snored softly in the center of my bed. I stretched across the quilt, scooped him into my arms, and scratched under his chin. His head tilted back, his eyes glazed, his purr sent a rumble of warmth through my bones.

Sitting on the edge of the high bed, Bayley in my lap, I listened to the radio. Nothing much new, but I had this need to stay and listen anyway.

North Haversham registered normal amounts of radiation, but just twenty miles east of here the level of fallout soared. Aunt May and Uncle Lemmy’s entire herd of cattle had sickened. And my little cousin Bethany. She had sickened too.

As I sat listening, stroking Bayley, I heard Gran climbing the narrow stairs.

“I was coming down,” I said.

Gran walked across the wood floor of the attic room and sat on my window seat. Her brown gaze never left my face.

We listened to the radio together. Bayley purred and licked my index finger over and over, softening me the way he did mice. Every now and then he’d close his teeth on my skin, but never hard enough to hurt.

Gran pushed at the net snugged around the edges of her dark hair as the news report continued.

I studied my grandmother, sitting on the window seat, her face round and wrinkled as a walnut. The radio crackled on my nightstand as a report came in from surveillance helicopters passing near the plume path.

“You think it will ever end?” I asked when the radio finally returned to music.

Gran shook her head. “Not for a long time.”

“Gran, did you ever feel so angry you could see the blood inside your eyes?”

“You angry because of the accident, Nyle?”

I nodded. “That. And other things.”

“That kind of anger’s not good for you.”

I turned off the radio. “I know.”

“Let it go, Nyle. Come on down and eat something.”

I eased Bayley back into the center of the quilt and smoothed the black fur on his side. Gran led the way down the stairs.

She went slowly. The dim light in the stairwell cast deep shadows, making it hard to see where one step ended and the next began. Gran turned to the side, gripped the worn rail, took one step at a time.