I shook my head. She had gained weight but it seemed too soon—only two months since Rainer’s arrival.

She lifted her shirt. Her line tattoo went all the way down her belly. She didn’t look pregnant, only soft. I pushed her shirt back down; even here, in the hayloft, in the calm slatted light, I knew the walls had eyes.

“I have to thank you,” Queen said. “Without you I never would have kept this baby.”

But I hadn’t encouraged her. “I don’t know if I’ve been that helpful,” I said. I felt she was trying to make me her ally, but I didn’t want to be implicated in her deceit.

“Thank you,” she said again.

I wondered whether I would have to betray her eventually. “Don’t you worry about what Dice will do when he finds out?”

“I think he already knows. He knows everything,” she said. “He’ll either change the rule, or I’ll run away.” Her voice turned harsh. “Distract me,” she said.

I wondered how to. Lindsay, the onrushing biodiversity collapse, how sinister the summer outdoors is, the heat climbing and climbing. I wanted to know if everyone felt a little afraid of open spaces, like I did. I wondered about how people who left the farm often died out there—Queen had said that—and about how we fought violence with violence. I wondered about the locks on the doors: Dice’s bedroom door, the trapdoor in the hayloft, the door behind the pigpen. I wondered whether Dice would be reasonable, when it became impossible to ignore Queen’s condition. “I have nothing to say.”

She said, “Want to hear the story of the first time I ran away from home?”

Today, I felt an obligation to obey even the less important rules. “Maybe it’s better not to dwell on the past,” I said.

She said, “Will you run your hands through my hair?” She lay down, her head in my lap.

She began to talk about the past, and I became too curious to tell her to be quiet. She told me about leaving Charlotte when she was fifteen. She packed Chewy bars, her velour tracksuit, and her mom’s picnic towel to use as a blanket. She wore jeans and a rugby shirt. She made a loop with her braided hair. “My hair used to be really long,” she said, “a lifelong braid, so long I’d put it on the table while I ate.”