Serena was looking at the trench too. “I’m working on it,” she said.

In the garden that afternoon, I bent over to pluck a trio of tiny ripe tomatoes from the vine, and when I straightened, Luke was staring at me. I smiled at him; he didn’t respond. I could feel his gaze on my skin like a touch. I felt the urge to bolt but only stood there, caught in the force of his attention. Deer, headlights. After what seemed like minutes, he spoke. “Oh good, the tomatoes,” he said, as if emerging from a trance. Was it a trance I had caused? I brought the basket to him, and that night I stood in front of the mirror, trying to re-create the way I had held my body, to catalogue whatever organization of limbs had caught his eye, had silenced him so completely, so that I might use it again and again, until Laurel pushed me out of the way to rub cream on her face and I remembered who I really was.

Later, we snuck into the kitchen in search of the steaks the head chef, Tenzin, had hidden for herself in the kitchen’s walk-in freezer. Tenzin was a jolly Tibetan woman who’d been at the Center as long as anyone could remember. “Tenzin can’t go three days without red meat,” Janet had said. “Never mind three months.” (Tibetan Buddhists, unlike some other varieties, tend not to be vegetarians, despite the usual prohibitions against killing living beings. It’s too cold there, Serena told me. You can’t survive a Tibetan winter eating only plants.) Laurel, who did rota in the kitchen, had the keys, and after half an hour of searching, just as I was beginning to shiver, we found the steaks under an unmarked box in the far back corner of the freezer. Janet cooked four of them in a kitchen lit only by moonlight and the fire of the gas stove. Laurel produced two bottles of champagne she had found somewhere, but Serena refused them.

“That’s not what we’re doing right now,” she said. Another rule: she never drank outside ritual. Alcohol was only useful for levitation. So instead, we accompanied our steaks with cold glasses of creamy organic milk, though I was almost certain I saw Laurel sneak something into hers. Afterward, we sat around eating strawberries from an enormous clay bowl.

“Strawberries are the sexiest fruit,” Laurel said. “Look: they force your mouth into the kissing position.”

“Just what you need,” said Janet. “More kissing.” I still wonder what Luke did to those strawberries. I’ve never had redder, or sweeter.

“Everyone could use more kissing,” Laurel said. “Well, almost everyone.”