I pressed my eyes shut. I couldn’t deal with this tonight.

But as I began to drift off to sleep, my fuzzy brain began to wonder if, all this time, who or whatever had seemed to be telling me to go hadn’t just been trying to make me feel unwelcome.

Maybe they were trying to warn me.

CHAPTER

20

AT BREAKFAST THE next morning, Laura looked like her normal self—which is to say, she didn’t have the look of a person who had been awake all night digging up flowers in a graveyard.

She gave me a pleasant smile as I came in. “How are we today?”

“Right as rain,” I said. It was an old silly saying of my dad’s.

But something about it struck Laura wrong. It was as if a shadow briefly passed over her features, and then it was gone.

“I’ve never liked that phrase,” she said. “It’s overly colloquial. Please don’t use it anymore.”

Uh . . . okay?

I sat down next to Agatha, who didn’t look up from her food, and pulled a slice of toast onto my plate.

“What’s that?” Laura asked. “That mark on your arm.”

I twisted my forearm to see what she was looking at—a black mark. While I was cleaning the letters from the door, I must have rested my arm against it.

“Oh,” I said. “I don’t know.”

Her brow furrowed. “Is it a bruise of some sort?”

I rubbed it away with my hand. “Nope. Just . . . maybe ink or something?”

The mark was gone, but her suspicion lingered.

I waited for Barrett to show up—my whole body waited for the sight of him the way you wait for Thanksgiving dinner when the smell of food starts wafting out of the kitchen—but he never did.

In the void, my mind turned back to the strange events of the previous night.

GO.

Should I?

Was this place, its isolation, its utter weirdness, Laura’s intensity, Agatha’s silence, so bad that I needed to get out? Even if getting out meant taking myself to the state institution?

She wouldn’t let me take the clothes, I thought. And while it felt small and petty, I knew it was the truth. Laura would pack me off with the rags I’d brought with me. Maybe a nicer backpack, if there was an old one stuffed into a closet somewhere. But the cashmere sweaters, the tasteful trousers, the thin-soled shoes that fit my feet like they’d been made for me? Nah.

Laura was weird, and my future was uncertain—would I ever have anything approaching a normal life?

But were those things reason enough for me to leave? No. No, they weren’t. Maybe someone braver than me, but not me.

I wasn’t going anywhere.