Voices and words and images from the past drifted through her mind. The good, the bad, the funny, the horrific. She remembered it all in a blinding, electric flash.

She closed her hand around the heart necklace at her throat, her talisman, felt the sharp bit of bone press into her palm. She drifted through the place, rattled the psychedelic beads that had given her parents the illusion of privacy. In their bedroom, she saw the dusty heap of belongings that revealed who they’d once been. A tangle of furs on the bed. Jackets hanging from hooks. A pair of boots with the toes eaten away.

She found her dad’s old bicentennial bandanna and shoved it in her pocket. Her mother’s suede headband hung from a hook on the wall. She took it, wound it like a bracelet around her wrist.

Up in her loft, she found her books lying scattered, the pages yellowed and chewed through; many had become a home to mice, as had her mattress. She could smell their scent in the air. A decaying, dirty smell.

The smell of a place forgotten.

She climbed back down the loft ladder, dropped onto the dirty, sticky floor, looked around.

So many memories. She wondered how long it would take her to work through them all. Even now, standing here, she didn’t know exactly how she felt about this place, but she knew, she believed, she could find a way to remember the good in it. She would never forget the bad, but she would let it go. She had to. There had been fun, too, Mama had said, and adventure.

Behind her, the door opened. She heard uneven footsteps come up behind her. Matthew stepped in beside her. “Alone is overrated,” he said simply. “Do you want. To fix it up? Live here?”

“Maybe. Or maybe we’ll burn it down and rebuild. Ashes make great soil.”

She didn’t know yet. All she knew was that she was back here at last, after all those years away, back with the crazy, durable fringe-dwellers in a state that was like nowhere else, in this majestic place that had shaped her, defined her. Once, a lifetime ago, she had worried about girls, only a few years older than her, who had gone missing. The stories had given her nightmares at thirteen. Now she knew there were a hundred ways to be lost and even more ways to be found.

*   *   *

SUCH A THIN VEIL separated the past from the present; they existed simultaneously in the human heart. Anything could transport you—the smell of the sea at low tide, the screech of a gull, the turquoise of a glacier-fed river. A voice in the wind could be both true and imagined. Especially here.