After lunch, I joined the family in our everyday chores. We had to clean the sheep’s stables, clean the cows’ and horses’ stables, clean the chicken houses, feed and water the chickens, make the cheese and the butter, clean the dairy, move the electric fence, check the flock, and weed, weed, weed. No one mentioned Queen. Pear was nowhere to be found. But I was no longer frightened. They had questioned me, and they had let me go.

Bay doled out more tasks. He saved my assignment for last. “Feed the chickens,” he said. He cuffed me on the neck. “Fatten them up.”

I chopped up the Dumpstered Red Delicious apples, unpeeled brown bananas, and stabbed the chunks of fruit onto the nails along the walls of their coops, all the while thinking about Queen. All kinds of terrible things happened in the fake world, and she had gone out alone. I pictured the fake world as Snowball Earth, desolate, inhospitable, so very lonely.

Now that Queen was gone, I wondered about her dark, doubting heart. I imagined her life devoid of accountability, a life dedicated only to herself, back to the trains, stealing, not making. I pitied her. No one person mattered as much as the group. I knew that now as sure as I knew that cream can pick up any flavor—it could pick up the flavor of sweat, even. I felt that the prelude to my time as an Asher was over; now the real work could begin.

The lights were on in the long house. I was so tired I sagged. I wanted to eat basil-flavored cream for dinner.

When I entered the meeting room, the tables were not set for dinner. The full family, including those I’d barely spoken with, twenty-three people, sat in a ring. Two stools were placed in the center. Pear sat on one; the other was empty. A hiss went up all around.

“Harmony,” said Sara. “Into the center, please.” I sat, rigid with fear. Pear sat next to me, slumped and spineless.

Sara began gently, “This is not a punishment, but a gift. A rebirth of our trust for you.”

So this was the rebirth. Queen had mentioned it the first morning we milked together. I desperately tried to remember what she’d said. It’s a ceremony, she’d said. It hadn’t sounded like a punishment.

“You were Queen’s best friend,” she said, and I understood the family was making an example of me. Queen was gone, and since there was no definite self, I’d reasoned that all of us were equally at fault. But that was not, as far as I could tell, the way the family was thinking of it. I tried to be open to the gift, as Sara had called it. But I was afraid.

Here was my punishment, finally, for all those conversations with Queen, and for the pregnancy, and for the pills, maybe, too.