“I’m sorry about that,” Bay said. “Didn’t want you to do anything stupid while we were gone. Because we really love you.” He paused. I knew I would spend hours thinking about this: Because we really love you, because we really love you. He looked out at the hickory tree. “Don’t worry.” I imagined the two of them in Bay’s dirty car, the long snaking road past Mars Hill, past tobacco shacks, past fuchsia maple trees and brown-gold sycamores. “I just asked him for a donation. He’s pretty well-to-do, believe it or not.” Maybe Bay had told Isaac about the action. I could almost see Isaac nodding, excited to be a part of it. Bay was always able to get what he wanted. He let us do the work ourselves.

“He didn’t seem rich,” I said, trying to be casual.

He kept his head turned away from me, and I again started to stroke his neck, which, like his face, was stippled with tiny scars. “He said some funny things, Harmony. He said he knew you in Durham. Is that true?”

I stopped touching him. “No,” I said.

“Another thing. Isaac said he came here to steal you away from us. Is that true?”

“No,” I said. I turned to look at the hickory tree and noticed the skinny, desperate squirrels rummaging around the roots—hundreds of them.

“And so I asked him for a donation, for your sake, you know. He was willing. He wants to help you.”

“No,” I said again, less a negation than a prayer.

“How did he find you?” Bay said.

I remembered the hillside with Lindsay. I’d talked about my mother pulling the soap bubble over me, and she’d said, There was a bubble machine like that in my hometown museum, too. “He couldn’t have known,” I said. I reached out to touch Bay’s hands, and was surprised to find that he let me.

“Come on,” he said. He stood. The sky was spanned by a meat-red line. “Let’s go,” he said. He led me across the courtyard, back behind the storage shed. He knelt on the ground and patted the earth, like a doctor feeling for tumors. He found what he was seeking, and dug into the ground with his bare hands, scrabbling in the dirt and pulling up clods, like he’d gone insane. Humans aren’t meant to dig like dogs. He reached a piece of canvas and then I realized, with a wave of horror, what he was seeking. The canvas was stiff with mud. He pulled it up and out rolled the camera that I had interred. He, or Dice, must have watched me bury it.