“Oh, right, of course!” she said, smiling brightly. “Photographer, I meant. He’s a friend of mine.”

I examined her, trying to place her in the squat, in the kitchen’s light, which was lacey from the dried flowers, on the corduroy couch or the porch swing, in front of the centaurs or lenticular Madonnas. We stared at each other, one of those long cat stares, renegotiating our power. I may have left him, but he was not hers. He was mine. In that moment, I needed Lindsay to understand, even as I knew I was revealing too much. “I dated him,” I said. “For years.”

“Berie?”

“Don’t say that name,” I said.

“Isaac said you’d gone to Virginia.”

I imagined her wrapping her black-tipped fingers around Isaac’s arm, Isaac’s neck. The two of them in his narrow room with the gardenias and the trains going by in the woods.

“I didn’t,” I said.

“Come back with me,” she said. “You’ve been brainwashed.” Fear blew away my sadness. I’d exposed myself.

She could tell Isaac where I was. And he could tell my mother. Then they’d wrest me from the only place I’d ever been happy. My countdown clock had started.

“What a decision,” Lindsay said. Looking back, it didn’t feel like a decision. It felt more like fate. Bay had been waiting for me by the bus stop, the lights in the tunnel pointing at his head.

The following morning, Lindsay was gone—she’d walked down to the road before anyone got up. Sara found her tracks through the dew, slick and dark.

CHAPTER 11

Roger looked so upset at breakfast that Bay took him back to the hayloft, with its rustling emptiness and slatted light. I wondered what they would talk about, how Bay would reassure him. I wished I could have spoken to Lindsay one more time—if only I could have explained myself better. If only she could have witnessed one singing, the power and knowledge in those old tunes, I’m glad that I was born to die. If only she could have seen the family after the action and understood how committed they were to the Earth. If only Dice had taken her on a walk and explained how we lived without hypocrisy.

I pictured her on the bus back to Durham, the same bus I’d been planning to take before Bay had found me. The bus wound its way out of the mountains, past Christmas tree farms and apple orchards, past broiler farms and broken-down furniture factories, into the Piedmont, the Cape Fear river basin, tobacco country, my old home—the journey I would never take again.

Instead, I stood on the lunch line in boots I couldn’t even claim as mine. Ahead of me, two Ashers—a woman and man—bent their heads together. “Lindsay went to the hayloft last night,” the man whispered.