Finally I lay back down, but I shook and sweated in my sheets. I slept and woke, exhausted. The house was dark and chilled. I didn’t dare go back to sleep. Yet, sleep overcame me, hauling me down. When I awakened in the dark, she was sitting in my chair near the window, her back to me. I could see her plainly in the silver light from the streetlamp. She didn’t turn around. “Thea,” she whispered. “Thea, you are the door.”

I snapped on my bedside lamp. Then, I stayed up the rest of the night, drinking so much tea and eating so much cinnamon toast that my stomach washed side to side like a water balloon when I walked.

When Jep came home, I climbed and clung to him, voracious, unable to wait even for him to shower the road off him. “What did I do right?” he asked me afterward, naked and streaked with new sweat.

“Don’t leave,” I pleaded. “Don’t go to any more camps. Don’t even go down to get a snack. I’ll bring you pie. I’ll bring you coffee. Stay up here, please. Remember when we were going to put a little refrigerator in our bathroom?”

“And then we decided it was too decadent?”

“Why did we decide that?”

“Because it is too decadent. We’re people with limits, Theaitsa.”

“Just stay by me.”

“What’s wrong tonight? What’s gotten into you? Not that I mind.”

“You’re right about everything. I’m up on the ledge. I have to find a way to vacuum my mind.”

While Jep was in the shower, I put on one of his shirts. He did go downstairs to make a sandwich. He did go down again, for pie. But he held me as I slept. Normally, I wouldn’t have craved this: I’m not a cuddler. Be skin to skin with me while we’re going at it, but afterward, you don’t have to prove anything else: Let me sleep unencumbered on my own little island of cotton and feathers.

In the middle of the night, I heard a crash and Molly’s frenzied growling. She wasn’t yapping, as she did to annoy the UPS guy; she was trying, in her aging, Australian-shepherd-lady way, to warn somebody off her turf. I paid attention, because Molly would have welcomed the ghost of Genghis Khan if he’d brought liver treats. Jep was on his feet, but I was faster, throwing my robe around my shoulders like someone in an English ghost story movie. Stefan was in the kitchen...with, to my horror, a sledgehammer in his hand.

“He was out there,” Stefan said.

“Who’s out there?”