When I pulled up to my apartment, Cal was waiting for me on the steps, bouncing his keys in his hand. “Where have you been?” he demanded.

“I went for a drive,” I said. “I needed to get out.”

He cocked his head at me. “Where did you go?” I could tell he suspected, but I didn’t want to say. Cal’s relationship with our mama was as tortured as mine, but in a completely different way. He had always been her favorite, her shining star, even when she was mocking him or making him feel small. And for his part, he loved her in a way I couldn’t. A way that involved actually being a regular presence in her life. But he also knew her, wasn’t blind to her many and varied faults. And he wouldn’t want me around her right now, not when I was vulnerable to her brand of poison. But if I didn’t admit where I’d been, I knew our mama wouldn’t, either. She liked her secrets. Leverage was always more useful than honesty. Another one of her lessons I’d be wise to remember.

“Nowhere.” I shrugged. “Just driving.”

“I tried to call you. About ten times.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I turned my phone off.” I held up my dark phone as evidence.

I could tell he wanted to press, but to his credit, he didn’t. Probably scared he’d push me right over the edge. “I was worried,” he said finally. “And you need to hurry up and change if we don’t want to be late.”

I stared at him and then down at my threadbare jeans and gray T-shirt. “Why do I need to change? Where are we going?”

He took a step closer to me, his face softening. “Izzy’s funeral, remember? It starts in less than an hour.”

“Oh, shit,” I said. “Give me ten minutes.”

I didn’t have a black dress, or any dresses, for that matter. I pulled on a pair of black slacks, shiny and cheap, and changed my T-shirt for a plain white button-down blouse with yellowing deodorant stains in the armpits. I scraped my hair back into a ponytail. In the mirror I looked thin and exhausted, my freckles standing out against my pale skin. The scariest part was how easily I recognized myself. As if the woman who’d looked in this mirror every day for the past twelve years had been the imposter and this broken, dead-eyed version was the real me, the Eve who was always destined to reappear.

“People are gonna ask about Junie’s funeral,” Cal called from the living room as I was slipping on a pair of scuffed black pumps. “They don’t understand why you’re not having one. Think it’s strange.”

“I don’t care what people think,” I said. For so long, that had been all I cared about. Measuring every action, every word, every thought against how it might reflect back on Junie. It was a kind of relief not to have to worry about it. Nothing I did, or didn’t do, could hurt her anymore.