Leni saw the city in bits and pieces through lowered lashes, blurred by the incessant rain. She saw women with babies huddled in doorways and men asleep in sleeping bags beneath the elevated road that looked down on this section of town. Leni couldn’t imagine why people would live this way when they could go to Alaska and live off the land and build themselves a home. She couldn’t help thinking about all those girls who’d been abducted in 1974 and found dead not far from here. Ted Bundy had been arrested, but did that mean the streets were safe now?

Mama found a pay phone and called a taxi. As they stood there waiting for it to arrive, the rain stopped.

A bright yellow cab pulled up to the dirty curb, splashing water on them. Leni followed her mama into the backseat, which smelled aggressively of pine. From here on, Leni saw the lights of the city through a window. With water everywhere, in drips and puddles, but no rain falling, the place had a jumbled, multicolored, carnival look.

They angled uphill. The old brick and low-rise part of the city—Pioneer Square—was apparently the pit people climbed out of when they got money. Downtown was a canyon of office buildings, skyscrapers, and stores, set on busy streets, with windows that looked like movie sets, inhabited by mannequins dressed in glitzy suits with exaggerated shoulder pads and cinched-in waists. At the top of the hill, the city gave way to a neighborhood of stately homes.

“There it is,” Mama said to the cabbie, giving him the last of their borrowed cash.

The house was bigger than Leni remembered. In the dark, it looked vaguely sinister, with its peaked roof pointing high into a black night sky and glowing diamond-paned windows. All of it was surrounded by an iron fence topped with heart-piercing spires.

“You sure?” Leni asked quietly.

Leni knew what this had cost her mother, coming home for help. She saw the impact of it in her mother’s eyes, in the slump of her shoulders, in the way her hands curled into fists. Mama felt like a failure coming back here. “It just proves they were right about him all along.”

“We could disappear from here, too. Start over by ourselves.”

“I might do that for myself, baby girl, but not for you. I was a crappy mother. I am going to be a good grandmother. Please. Don’t give me a way out.” She took a deep breath. “Let’s go.”

Leni took hold of Mama’s hand; they walked up the stone path together, where spotlights shone on bushes sculpted to look like animals and spiky rosebushes cut back for winter. At the ornate front door they paused. Waited. Then Mama knocked.

Moments later, the door opened and Grandma appeared.