“Hello?” she called from the kitchen around the growing lump in her throat. She went into the living room to see if he’d started work in there like they’d planned. But she heard telltale banging from upstairs. Was he working in the hallway, which was still bare stud walls, exposed wiring?

“Daddy?” she called.

“Up here,” he yelled back.

She jumped the stairs two at time, and then her chest got tight when she saw he wasn’t in the hallway and that the door to her bedroom was open. This room was her haven—beautiful and pristine, with a neatly made bed and all of her treasures lined up on shelves: stuff she’d found with her metal detector (old buttons, nails, musket balls), the pelt from a fox she’d shot and skinned herself, and her favorite photo of Mama, taken a few weeks before she left. Mama was outside at the picnic table holding a plastic tumbler, grinning into the camera. She had on her lucky necklace, the one she never took off those last weeks before she left—a pattern of a circle, triangle, and square nested inside each other with another circle with an eye at the center. Mama called it her I see all necklace. Olive had taken the picture. It was a warm early-summer night and Daddy was cooking chicken on the grill. The radio was tuned to a classic rock station, and Mom and Dad were drinking rum and Cokes from big plastic tumblers. Olive had been happy because Mama had been home and in a good mood, and she and Daddy had been getting along so well, kissing and calling each other “honey” and “baby” and all those other terms of endearment that used to make Olive roll her eyes and make pretend gagging noises, when secretly she thought it so sweet that they were still so in love. That night, when she saw Mama take Daddy’s hand after he came back from the grill with a plateful of seared chicken legs, Olive really believed they were still in love and that everything was going to be okay.

Olive walked slowly down the hall, like the way you walk in a creepy haunted house at Halloween when you don’t really want to see what’s going to happen next.

But it was no use. She could shut her eyes and pretend it wasn’t happening, but she knew she had to look eventually. And she knew just what she’d see.

Olive walked into the bedroom to see that the shelves had been taken off the wall, the photo and all of her other things haphazardly shoved into cardboard beer boxes. Her bed had been pushed into the middle of the room and the boxes were piled on top of it. It reminded Olive of a life raft in the center of a turbulent ocean.