My name is Emily Porter. I’m twenty-one years old and I am renting a cabin on a tiny island in the north woods of Maine for reasons I no longer remember.

I go through this mental routine each time I wake, if only to assure myself I didn’t get the lobotomy I joked about yesterday before sleeping—what, fifteen, twenty?—hours until just now. I don’t even remember going to sleep. Nor do I remember where I lived before this, where I went to college, or the name of the high school with the blue lockers and squeaky gymnasium floor where I graduated. Including what happened to the garnet ring on my index finger as I accepted my diploma, or the name of the woman who gave it to me other than simply Mom.

Names, identifiers, faces up to age nineteen and everything in the two years since. All gone.

“A certain amount of postprocedure depression is normal. That will change, in time.”

I slide my hand to the curve of my skull just above my left ear. To the stubby patch concealed by the longer hair above it. Not so stubby anymore. It could almost qualify for a military cut.

“As will that.”

“Not fast enough.” I flip the afghan off my legs, pop two pills from the bottle on the coffee table, already trying to decide what culinary disaster I’ll create tonight. Caretaker is a misleading word; ever since I reached the two-week observation and recovery mark, Clare has seen to it that I cook, do laundry, find a job and my way around town as though I were already on my own.

“I’m thinking I should stay away from casseroles for a while. How do you feel about tuna quesadillas?” I get up and pad toward the kitchen, wash my hands. When she doesn’t respond, I glance at her and say, “That good, huh?”

That’s when I realize she’s wearing the same blouse and skirt she wore the first day, the wooden tao cross hanging just below her collar. It looks like a capital T, which is what I thought it was the first time I saw it, for her last name: Thomas. And then I see the suitcase by the door.

A surge of panic wells up inside me.

“Today was my last day, Emily,” she says quietly. “I was just waiting for you to wake.”

“Oh.” I put down the dish towel, finish drying my hands on my sweatpants. Look around me, lost.

Clare tilts her head. “We talked about it when you got up for a while this morning—remember?”

No. I don’t remember. But I don’t need to turn to see the calendar hanging on the fridge behind me, to follow the line of Xs through each day in September to today—the twentieth—to know she’s right.