One chest-thumping eternity later, the clinic welcomes me. My heart finally breathes at the familiar sight of the rattling generator and water catchment cones stacked against the back of the building. Inside, the clinic lobby is bright and empty. There’s no one at the counter desk or at the large filing cabinet, nobody standing next to the Sparkletts water cooler, and nobody in the hallway of doors stretching from the lobby to its farthest room in back.

Voices murmur behind one of the doors, and blood rockets through my neck. Nevertheless, I refuse to stop moving, one foot in front of the other, deeper inside the clinic. If I stop, I’ll lose my courage. If nothing bad is happening to Molly, I’ll go back to the mobile home and finish my conversation with Darcy.

A brittle, yellowing poster peels off the lobby wall. NIGHTLIGHT. Your path through the dark, it reads in the sort of curvy, decades-old font from the first-edition Stephen King books my mom takes from the library. I pull Ario’s recorder from the depths of my humidity-dampened shirt and place it between my teeth. The woodsy, bitter flavor calms my drumbeat heart as I remember him…his meaty, confident fingers sliding up my thigh…Unfortunately, the recorder also resurrects memories of showing up to the Hannigan home with a meal for someone who was already dead.

“—remember that instead of interrupting next time,” Miss Manners’s syrupy voice floats through the door.

“I won’t,” Molly whispers. “I’m just new. Sorry.”

“‘Sorry’ is a step in the right direction.” The blood in my neck comes to a full boil. “There—all better. It won’t scar.”

Molly’s okay—okay enough. Now go, Connor. That was the deal. Piss off before you get your face cut. I’m creeping, heel-toe, back toward the door, when my attention snags on a plaque hanging above the open filing cabinet. Framed with carved, pastel flowers, the cozy décor is irritatingly out of place in such a cold, official space. The hand-stitched blessing on the plaque reads:

If tears could build a stairway,
and memory a lane,
I’d walk right up to Heaven
and bring you home again.

Pitifully, my first instinct is to take it because it’s exactly the kind of sentimental, Christian gobbledygook my mom would love for her birthday. I’m not really in the gift-giving mood this year on this day, but maybe once I’m out of here, if I gave her a present, Mom would feel extra guilty about what she’s put me through.

Ah, Major, it’s cute you think your mom feels the human emotion known as guilt.