Someone says, “Look at her. She’s so good with them.” It’s a neighbor, an older woman, someone Kendra dismisses as not understanding the struggle.

Kendra says, “Well, that is her only job. You do know why she’s here, right? Where she came from?” Our Queen raises her eyebrows expectantly. She can’t help herself. She’s tired of everyone treating the sitter like some kind of saint. Not now. Not now that she knows how she really is.

The neighbor backs off, shrugging. “She seems like a nice girl to me.”

“Of course she’s nice,” Kendra snaps. “I wouldn’t trust her with my boys if she weren’t. It’s just—you have to watch her closely, if you know what I mean.”

Kendra walks off to check the ice. Grabs a bag from the freezer in her garage and hauls it down to the cooler to refill, tossing it onto the beer bottles inside, burying them. She balls up the empty plastic bag and carries it to the trash can under the tree.

Two of the neighborhood men are standing a few feet away, sipping from their plastic cups. They are watching Daphne, and Kendra is watching them.

“I’d hit that,” one says.

The other laughs, tips his cup up, finishing it. He turns and softball pitches it into the trash can.

He doesn’t even see Kendra.

She might as well be invisible.

THIRTY-TWO

Theresa

Greg was right. Gunston University’s campus had completely changed since I’d last been there. The university had put up new buildings and torn down old ones, added roads and walking paths, and I had a hard time even finding a parking space. The campus had always been an oasis in the middle of a busy city, its green lawns and center quad an oasis of calm against the concrete strip malls and department stores on its outskirts. But in the decade I’d been gone, the structures had shot up like looming monsters and everything felt busier and more impersonal.

I had no idea where Greg’s class was held, so I first had to go to the English department, talk to the nice but impatient and vaguely suspicious receptionist who smelled like chicken soup, and then trek across campus to a new building. I was worried I would miss him, but when I found the room and peered through the pane of glass in the door, he was still there wrapping up.

The classroom looked like a conference room, with wall-to-wall industrial gray carpeting and a number of round tables instead of rows of desks. Students sat around them in various states, checking phones, leaning forward, chins propped in hands, scribbling notes. When I took my Literature and Society course with Greg, it had been in an old building, wood floors that creaked, smudged windows. He had never stood in front of us but gathered our desks in a circle. It always felt intimate.