As I read, I would sometimes hear Barrett walk by in the hall, and I’d be overcome by resentment and envy. He could come and go as he pleased. And I hated the thought that he could overhear me awkwardly reading to Agatha.

Because of the time I spent confined to the nursery, I put aside my insecurities and jumped at the chance to work in the garden with Laura on the first day she deemed Agatha well enough to get up and spend the morning in John’s office. Our next big project was cleaning out the greenhouse, which meant hauling old plants to the compost bins and organizing the shelves of dormant bulbs and boxes of unplanted seed packets. We also washed and squeegeed the glass walls, and unscrewed and scrubbed out the insulation vents, which were coated with dust and grime. After we finished that, Laura’s grand plan was to replace every bit of quarter-inch drip-line sprinkler tubing, which would take the better part of a week.

Don’t get me wrong—the existing quarter-inch drip-line tubing was in an appalling state and needed replacing. But by the end of the week, the amplified sun and steamy heat of the greenhouse were wearing me out.

Still, there was an upside: Laura seemed to take satisfaction not only in the quality of the work I did, but in the fact that I was strong enough to keep up with her feverish pace. After the first couple of days, she stopped asking me every few hours about headaches and whether I’d had any odd mental episodes.

“You’re strong,” she said to me once, watching me drag a pot with a dead palm tree in it across the walkway. “Did you play sports?”

“Cross-country,” I said. “But I wasn’t fast. I’m not very athletic.”

“Ah,” she said.

I had a memory of the coach saying to me, So this is just résumé padding for you, right? I don’t want to push you harder than you want to be pushed. (Which at the time I found insulting, but in hindsight was a pretty reasonable question.)

“My sisters were athletic, though,” I said. “They were both cheerleaders at their middle school.”

She smiled, but it was an uneasy smile.

I was caught up in the sudden surge of memories. “Siena was really good, technically—I mean, her technique. She was thirteen. Dina was just okay at tumbling, but she had crazy stage presence. She was always smiling. She truly believed in the greatness of the sixth-grade-girls’ volleyball team. You never looked at any of the other cheerleaders, because Dina was, like, glowing.”