"You hold her as long as you want," Helen said as soothingly as her gruff voice would allow. She gave Mavis a stern glare. "But we need to cut the cord."

Mavis held out a pair of silver shears. The others eyed them reverentially, as if they'd all seen them before. As if they'd cut the cords of their children and their own. She opened the blades and snapped them shut—snick!—and each of the younger women flinched.

All except Laura, whose attention was focused solely on the dead child at her breast.

But she had cried. Sheila was certain of it.

You heard what you wanted to hear, she thought. Wishful thinking, that's all.

Maybe it had been. Maybe she was still a little drunk. Her mind overtaxed. Wound up by the altercation and anger and Barclay and all kinds of swirling emotions she couldn't quite hold on to long enough to decode.

An auditory hallucination. That was what she would've said if someone told her about it. If she hadn't experienced it herself. Not the worst thing to befall her. Under the circumstances, probably even justified.

Helen took the umbilical cord in both hands and held it for Mavis to cut.

Laura cradled her baby and let them, all the fight worn out of her.

Mavis eyed her cautiously as the blades cut through the meaty tissue and came together audibly. Dark fluid oozed from both ends as the fleshy material slipped back into the pool.

It happened so fast Sheila couldn't be sure, when she looked back on it after the confusion of the evening, that she hadn't been mistaken. That she hadn't maybe hallucinated it, like the dead baby's cry.

When it happened, a cold hand of terror clutched her spine.

It could have been from concentration, general dryness or an unconscious tic—but for one fleeting moment as Mavis Lynch's tongue flicked out and moistened her lower lip, Sheila was sure she saw anticipation in the old woman's eyes.

She puzzled over that look for several minutes.

The only sound in the St. John house during that time was Laura's weeping as the other women circled around her to mourn.

Martin gazed up at the stars and marveled, still slightly drunk from the Legion bar. He hadn't seen so many stars since he left Stratford for the city. Even on vacation it seemed like there was less visible in the sky than here and now. The kind of night to contemplate your place in the grand scheme of things. The kind that made your own problems feel insignificant, no matter how insurmountable they might seem.

It had become that kind of night long before he stood in the middle of a deserted island road in the woods—County Road 8, according to the sign—the streetlamps on either side burned out, the ocean beating against the shore the only sound for miles. What happened at the St. Johns' house had cut the festivities tragically short.