The men were scuffling and the furniture was breaking. There was a loud crash as the mirror on the dresser broke.

“I’ve got you,” said Murray as he grabbed up Rose and carried her out of the room, running down the steps with her.

She could hear sirens approaching. “Murray, I’m blind!” she sobbed. “Murray, my throat is on fire.”

Rose woke up in the ICU. Her eyes were bandaged, her throat was aching unbelievably, and her hands were strapped so that she couldn’t move.

Aunt Marge and Murray were with her. Desperately, they were trying to reach Uncle Lestan. They would not give up trying. They would find him.

“I’m blind now, aren’t I?” Rose wanted to ask, but she couldn’t talk. Her throat wouldn’t open. The pain in her chest was grinding.

Gardner Paleston was dead, Murray assured her. He’d died from a blow to the head in the fight with Murray.

It was an open-and-shut case of attempted murder-suicide. The bastard, as Murray called him, had already posted his suicide note online fully describing his plan to give Rose “the burning hemlock,” along with an ode to their mingled decomposing remains. She heard Aunt Marge begging Murray to stop talking.

“We’re going to find Uncle Lestan,” Marge said.

Terror engulfed Rose. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t see. She couldn’t beg for reassurance; she couldn’t even tell them about the pain, the unrelenting pain. But Uncle Lestan was coming. He was coming. Oh, what a fool she’d been, such a fool, to have loved Gardner, to have trusted Gardner. She was so ashamed, ashamed as she’d been years ago lying on the floor of Amazing Grace Home, so ashamed.

And all the confusion about the books, those books which had affected her so deeply that for days she’d lived in them, imagining Uncle Lestan to be the hero, rising with him, in his arms, towards the stars. Give me the stars.

She lapsed back into sleep because there was no place else to go.

There was no day or night, only an alternating rhythm of activity and noise. More commotion in the room, and in the corridor beyond, more voices near at hand yet muffled, indistinct.

Then a doctor was talking to her.

He was close by her ear. His voice was soft, deep, resonant, sharpened by an accent she didn’t know.

“I am caring for you now,” he said. “I will make you well.”

They were in an ambulance moving through traffic, and she could feel every bump of the road. The siren was distant but steady. And when she woke next she knew she was on a plane. She could hear Marge talking softly to someone, but it wasn’t Murray. She couldn’t hear Murray.