I try not to resent this place with its sepia-toned memories, the girl in pigtails I see skipping about and the imaginary brother I thought I should have. The sun-bleached floorboards and red-stitched rugs. The cracked clay coffee cups my father insists on keeping because I made them in elementary school. The turkey handprints on the wall. But it’s all too much of a reminder of before. The pretty little child running somewhere just behind me. The reluctant student with flowing hair and brow furrowed over books at the kitchen table. Not at all matching the scarred, half-bald reflection glaring back at me from the glass of the microwave cabinet.

“Coffee?” my father asks as he slides a mug into my hands.

“Thanks,” I say, remembering the perks of living with other addicts.

Pressed between my palms, the cup’s warmth is comforting. I take a sip and watch through the kitchen window as half a dozen children spill out of a minivan across the street.

“Looks like the Harts are having a party,” I murmur.

“All those grandkids,” my father says, a bit wistfully. “It’s Thanksgiving.”

I blink, and then do the math in my head. The fire was some time in the early hours of Friday, the fifteenth. I was unconscious for three days. At some point, skin was shaved off my thigh—not my ass, like I told Teddy—and grafted onto my face and arm. Mornings began with dressing changes, then there were physical and occupational therapy sessions, and my dressings were changed again. Applications of antibiotic ointments. Visiting hours. Somehow, as the whiteness of my skin graft slowly shifted to pink, hours turned into days, days into weeks, and today into Thanksgiving. And the strange cars and odd stillness on my street and my doctor’s absence this morning and Danae’s grumbling about having to be at work suddenly make sense.

“I hope you don’t mind.” My mother eyes me over her own cup. “But Verena’s coming for dinner. I know,” she says at the look on my face, “that you’d prefer not to see anyone. But I invited her weeks ago. And she’s still new, doesn’t know many people, her boyfriend’s—”

“Fine,” I say, thinking that some things never change.