Dr. Layne looks past me to the empty lot out the window. “Except the flames do hurt it. They completely consume it. The magic of the phoenix is not that it’s unharmed, but that it’s reborn.”

I turn to the window again, unsure that visiting these particular ashes will produce any sort of magical transformation. Dr. Layne tries another approach.

“Look at it this way: What was the most painful part about the hospital?”

I don’t even have to think.

“The tank.”

Just saying the word makes my skin hurt, thinking of the nurses scrubbing off my scabs, picking off my skin in tweeze-size snippets.

“Exactly. But the nurses had to remove the burned areas so the grafts could grow. If you hold on to the old skin, you’ll never heal.” She leans across me, pulls the shiny handle, and pushes open my door. “Time to let go.”

I reluctantly follow her across the front lawn. Mom’s tulips burn red and orange along the walkway to where the front door should be. We walk on a soft mix of ash and dirt and random charred bits, maybe something I loved once.

Dr. Layne asks me to describe how the house was laid out, so I try to picture walking in the front door, Mom’s handbell curio cabinet straight ahead, a massive leather couch to the right. I walk around the foundation, which seems so much smaller now. You’d never know by looking at it how much life—and love—it once held.

“This was the family room,” I say.

I walk across the space into what was the kitchen.

“Our table was kind of right”—I move over a few feet so I’m square with the multipeaked mountain I could see while eating breakfast—“here.”

The wind whips my bandana against my neck. As it blows through the trees, I can almost hear Dad’s voice reading the headlines and Mom’s laugh on the phone. I close my eyes and hear her singing, Dad clanging pans to make bacon on Sunday morning, Mom yelling at me for missing curfew, Dad sitting at the table crying when his own dad died.

I open my eyes.

The voices leave.

A gust stirs the ashes into a mini dust devil made of my past. Spinning across my old kitchen, the dirt flies with nothing to hold it down, nothing to cling to but air.

“What’s the point of all this?” I say. “Is this part of my therapy? Checking off the seven stages?”

Dr. Layne just looks at me.

“Which one am I on now? Anger, right?” I reach down and fill my hands with ashes and dirt, my life sifting between my fingers. I fling it after the dust devil, trying somehow to hit it. To hurt it. To stop it from looking so sad and solitary and pathetic.

I throw another handful.

And another.