The woman looked at Thea with a wet-eyed, accusing, marsupial expression. This went on for a while. It was like being on the phone with someone and not knowing whether you’d been disconnected. The longer Thea looked, the more varieties of emotion she detected: sorrow, fury, a tiny sense of humor trying to fill its sails with wind.

“If you don’t—” said Thea at last.

The woman took her hand from her mouth. “Do,” she said. “Think so. This way.”

Longing always did bring you worse and worse places, to junk shops and deserted parks; longing had in Georgia’s life taken her to unfamiliar dorm rooms when she was still in high school, to group houses and dingy apartments, to drink in, smoke in, shoot up in, and finally overdose, which she did for the first time in an abandoned house in East Portland. First time, that’s what Florence called it when she phoned Thea. How had the news found her? But Thea was glad to hear Florence say, in the calm voice of a driver spinning into a ditch, “Here we go.”