“It’s okay,” her mother said, and patted her hand. “I know you mean well, but you don’t understand everything.” She put a finger over Laurie’s lips before she could respond. “I know you think you do, but believe me, you don’t.”

She didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what to do. She wanted to cry from frustration.

“No matter what happens, I want you to always remember that I love you.”

“I love you, too,” Laurie said, although even as she spoke the words she was thinking that she loved her other mother more.

Love wasn’t perfect, she realized. It didn’t cure all ills and didn’t solve all problems and wasn’t always what was needed. It also wasn’t equal. There was a hierarchy of love, some people you loved more than others, and it did make a difference. Sometimes just loving someone was not enough. Sometimes you had to love someone enough.

Would she have really traded her childhood and her new family for a life with this family in the House?

No.

Her father, her biological father, walked into the kitchen. “What’s going on in here?” he asked. “What’s taking so long? We’re thirsty out there.”

Her mother stared at him with a blank, unreadable expression, and whatever else he’d been intending to say died in his throat. “Go back out there with our guests,” she said. “I’ll bring the lemonade out in a minute.”

He nodded.

“Father?” Laurie said.

“Yes?”

“Stop seeing her. Stop seeing Dawn.”

His face reddened, tensed, and he was about to say something, to respond angrily, but he glanced over at her mother’s face and closed his mouth.

“She’s evil,” Laurie said.

He nodded tiredly, started to turn away.

They were doomed, she saw now. There was no way she could change anything, no way any of their future could be avoided. Still, she was glad she’d talked to them, and she felt a little bit better knowing that she’d at least made an effort.

“Go out there with your father,” her mother said. “I’ll bring the drinks in a minute.”

Laurie nodded, gave her mother’s hand a small squeeze, and she and her father walked back into the dining room where her future family waited.

SEVENTEEN

Daniel

The Other Side.

It was not something he could have anticipated, not even from those views through the windows of the other House.

It was not like any afterlife he had ever imagined. There were no blue skies or fields of green, no cloud palaces, no geographical distinctions at all. There were no hydras or unicorns or banshees, no gods or monsters, no recognizable beings. Occasional indistinct blobs of blackness flew by, shooting past him as though shot from a cannon, but for the most part this world was empty, barren, devoid of even the smallest sign of life or movement.