They walked until they reached the park on Walker. It was small—only two swings and a slide—but she often took the children there. It was bordered by oak trees, and Tyler liked to collect the acorns and line them up on the perimeter of the sandbox.

“I know this park,” she said.

“You do?”

“Tyler likes the acorns.”

“You know what’s on the other side of the stream?”

“There’s a house back there,” she said.

“Not just a house,” he said. “Let me show you.”

He held her hand tighter, and she followed him over the boulders and onto the bank on the other side. She scrambled behind him, up the steep incline until the ground leveled off. It was densely wooded, but the moonlight streamed through the trees revealing a small clearing a few yards in front of them. He led her to it and then stopped. Inside, were rock pillars, large sculptures made up of hundreds of flat rocks placed atop each other, each at opposing horizontal angles and each growing progressively smaller so that the result was ten symmetrically balanced towers.

“What is it?” Josie asked.

“Some college kids built it years ago. There are different theories on why. Some people say it was a physics experiment, some say it was an alien hoax.”

“And they don’t fall?”

“A few must in heavy rainstorms, but someone always seems to rebuild them. Come on.” He led her close to one. “It’s all sandstone, which means whoever built them hauled these rocks in here.”

Josie looked closely at a pillar. It towered a few feet above her head, and when she looked up it seemed to sway. She took a step back.

“They won’t fall. Don’t worry.”

This time she took his hand. He led her between the pillars, and it reminded her of how her parents had once taken her and her cousin Natalie to a park filled not with swings and slides and jungle gyms but enormous fiberglass toys—dolls the size of grown-ups, a cradle too high to see inside, a tea set with a cup big enough to bathe in. “Go ahead, Jojo,” her father had said. “You can pretend you’re the size of a mouse,” but she clung to his hand and pressed herself close against his waist, and when he questioned her, she was only able to tell him that everything was too big.

Now, she pressed herself a little closer to Devesh. In the back corner of the clearing was a platform of sorts. “What’s that?” she asked.

“A bench, but you can tell it was built by someone else. The stone they used is from down by the stream.”