Germ’s brothers hover around us, bringing us juice and applesauce and peanut butter toast because that’s what they know how to make. It’s a nice break from how they usually just torment Germ by licking all the sweets in the house to claim them for themselves. Eventually Mrs. Bartley shoos them outside because it’s too crowded. Germ and my mom and I take turns taking showers. Washing the grime off, I want to cry, to think I’m washing away the particles of my house and how I may never see it again.

“You and your mom stay as long as you need to,” Mrs. Bartley says to me once we’ve settled in, squeezing my arm. “We love the company.” I try to ignore that she’s shouting it over the din of Germ and her brothers bickering.

We sleep half the day, exhausted. My mom is established on the couch that night, though she spends most of the dusk outside, staring through the trees in the direction of the sea. Does she remember my brother with the same muscle memory I hope she remembers me with? Or is it the other thing, the rising shape in the waves that the cloud shepherd showed me, that she is thinking of? Is it both?

I have brought my orange backpack, and Germ keeps slipping things into it that she thinks I might need if I run.

“Your mom can stay with us as long as she needs,” Germ says as she tucks a pack of tissues into the front pocket, a compass she nicked from one of her brothers into the flap at the front, money for a train ticket she’s taken from the savings she keeps rolled into her pillow. “We’ll look after her. My mom’ll make sure the insurance company handles things. I’ll make sure nobody sends your mom away. Don’t worry about that, Rosie.”

I make my bed up on the floor of Germ’s room, occasionally glancing out the window at the moonless night. What if Homer’s wrong and the Memory Thief does come back tonight, not “licking her wounds” after all? How long would it take for her to find me here?

Germ puts a sleeping bag beside me. When we have sleepovers, neither of us sleeps on the bed. Out of habit, Germ switches on the news.

We listen to the sounds of everyone else going to bed, including my mom. And then we lie in silence in our sleeping bags, staring at the ceiling while the news drones on in the background.

“I think the witch took some memories of us. I don’t know—there’s just some hollow places in my head.”

Germ smiles. “There’s always been hollow places in your head,” she teases.

“Remember when we used to build little frog hotels out of logs?” I say, after a long silence. Germ nods.

“I still remember that,” I say.