I sit with my knees pulled in tight and my arms wrapped around my shins. I can no longer feel my feet, as if blood refuses to spread so far from my heart.

I am waiting for my mother to die.

Time becomes nothing to me but a march toward my mother's Return. I wish it were a solid thing, something I could grab and shake and stop. Instead, it slips away from me, the day continually unfurling. People from the village come to console me but they don't know what to say. My brother's wife, Beth, has sent word that she prays for us, but the Sisters will not allow her to leave her bed for fear of her losing the child.

I have seen Harry standing a distance away, the harsh after noon sun glaring from his face. I'm glad he doesn't try to approach me, doesn't try to speak to me about this morning when he held my hand under the water and kept me from my mother.

I wonder if he still thinks that we are going to the Harvest Celebration together next week. It won't be canceled, even in light of my mother's death. As the Sisterhood always reminds us: this is the way after the Return—life must continue. It is our cycle to bear.

As the sun sets Cassandra brings me dinner and sits with me. It is a painfully beautiful sunset and the colors reflect off Cass's pale face and hair. The Guardian has kept his distance this evening, knowing that the end must be getting near. I have been alternating between hope that my mother turns quickly and is soon out of her misery and dread that she will turn too quickly and I will have lost her forever.

After a while I say, “Cass, do you believe in the ocean? Do you think it's still out there?” I'm watching the way the light plays off the tops of the trees in the Forest, the way everything in sight undulates.

“Remind me what your mother used to say about the ocean again?” she asks. Her voice is soft and kind.

“Nothing but water,” I remind her. Cass has always indulged my fancies, has always listened as I repeated the stories of life before the Return that have been passed down by the women of my family. Once, her mother forbade her to speak with me because she said I was filling Cass's head with lies and blasphemy. But our village is too small for such an edict to ever take hold.

“I just don't see how there could ever be that much water in the world, Mary,” she tells me. She has told me this many times before. Her eyes are bright as she turns from the sunset to look at me. “I cannot imagine a place out there without Unconsecrated.” She knots her eyebrows together. “Because why would we be here rather than there?” A tear gathers in the corner of her eye, the fading sun glinting off it as it bulges and spills down her cheek, the image of my mother in her pen too much for her to bear. I pull Cass close and let her lay her head in my lap, her face turned away from the Forest, and stroke her hair the way my mother used to stroke my own. We watch as the lanterns come on in the village. My mother used to tell me about the times when she was a child when the Sisters would crank up the old generator on Christmas Eve. It's one of the stories I have never shared with my friend and I think about telling Cass this—about how once a year this little village used to outshine the sky.