I can’t leave, I can’t, I can’t. Maybe if I simply stay, it’ll all go back to how it was in the morning. Maybe it comes and goes. I can deal with that. I can’t deal with it being over.

But no. I know it’s over.

I get in the back of the taxi as the driver puts my things in the trunk.

I look out the window at the cottage, knowing in my heart that it’s different. It’s changed. Avalon has changed. Everyone is gone.

Everyone is gone but me.

“How was the trip?” asks the driver.

I bite the tip of my tongue to keep from screaming. I cannot bring myself to say more than, “Good. Thanks.”

“All right,” he says. “It’ll be about an hour ride, ma’am, so settle in. I’ll let you know when we’re getting close.”

I nod, feeling like an injured little kid, and say, “Okay.”

I stare outside, watching it all go by.

My eyelids start to grow heavy, and I don’t know how long it takes, but somehow, I fall asleep.

I dream that I’m running around Avalon, as I had been, but that when I get to the pub and bang on the door, the sound is thin. Not timeworn chestnut as hard as rock, but thin plywood. The pub isn’t real, it’s just a painting.

Desperate, I lean against a tree, only to have it fall over too. It’s hollow.

I look up, expecting to see the moon, but find tracks of lighting.

The grass is plastic, like that on the stage tonight. The fog pumps from a machine at my feet. The wind comes from a fan.

It’s like that scene in The Truman Show with the stairs leading to the door through the sky. All of the life that felt so real, turning out to be something synthetic, something created.

In my dreams, I see Avalon as if it were an empty soundstage.

Nothing more.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

I keep my Dodgers hat low and my sunglasses on as I move through LAX. I’m recognized by a few people anyway, who whisper and point, and I fend off some who dash up, taking pictures of me or filming themselves with me as they ask if I really am pregnant, ask if I know the twist of the next Marvel movie Grayson is going to star in, and ask where I’ve been.

I go through the delirious motions of arrival. I wait in the long bathroom line, and, like many weary travelers, I see a sallow reflection I barely recognize, but in my case it’s uniquely unfamiliar.

I’m back to reality.

Thinned nose. Sharp collarbone. Plump lips. Never has a girl been so disappointed to see that she’s twenty pounds thinner.