And then she smelled the smoke, turned and saw the flames, how they licked up the far wall like the tongue of a great demon, gobbling the dry wooden beams, the painted floor and ceiling. She ran to the front doors, her and a throng of women and girls in their plain dresses with work aprons over the top, hair pulled back. They pushed, they pounded and clawed and screamed, but the heavy wooden door did not budge.

Trapped. They were trapped.

She thought of the windows. Thought that if they were calm, if they could all get to the windows and break through them, they could escape. But the women, in full panic now, screaming, choking on the smoke, which had grown black and thick, kept pushing at the doors, at the women between themselves and the door. She was pinned there, pressed tight by the bodies around her. She could not move.

Helen opened her eyes, took a gasping breath of cool air.

She was not in the factory being crushed against the locked door while flames overtook the building.

But where was she?

Who was she?

I am Helen, she told herself, taking a deep breath, trying to slow her racing heart. I’m married to Nate. We used to live in Connecticut, where we were both middle school teachers. Now we live in Vermont and are building our own house.

She reached for Nate beside her, but he was not there.

She rolled over, realized she was not in her bed but on the plywood subfloor of the unfinished house.

Her head ached and felt foggy.

It was the smoke. The smoke from the mill.

But that was only a dream.

There was a little pile of half a dozen bricks from the mill beside her, one side of each stained black. There was a flashlight beside them, turned off.

She’d snuck back up to the house after Nate had gone to bed and brought the bricks into the house, hoping that they might trigger something, that they might pull someone back. But after sitting in the dark with the bricks for a while, she had realized her mistake. Hattie had come back not just because of the beam but because she had a connection to this place. What reason would one of the mill workers have to show herself to Helen? To come back to a little half-built house at the edge of a bog in Hartsboro, forty miles from where the mill once stood. She’d been debating going back down to the trailer but decided that she’d stay a little while in case Hattie decided to show up again. Maybe Hattie would give her a sign about what she was supposed to do next. She must’ve dozed off on the floor, waiting in vain.

She sat up, pushed the button on her watch: 3:33 a.m.