“Why do you get to go somewhere?” she asked.

I kissed her forehead. “I have to take care of some things,” I said, which was true. “And I’m an adult,” I said. She wrinkled her nose at me.

If my mother died, I thought, would they let me keep her? Could we do it? The two of us alone? It already felt that way sometimes. I didn’t want a kid, though. I wanted what was right in front of me.

“Better?” Bear asked, jarring me out of my downward spiral of thoughts.

“Sure,” I said. I sank into the understuffed leather couch, which felt like a cocoon I never wanted to get out of. Buddy made himself a space next to me, curled into a spot that was too small for his bulky body but that he insisted on getting into, grunting, turning circles, until he finally settled with a low groan and his chin on my thigh.

Bear came and sat facing me, his leg crooked on the seat, one foot dangling over the edge.

“Tell me what’s going on,” he said.

The fire cracked and hissed, a roar of energy rising up the chimney. The flannel already smelled like wood smoke and something else, spicy and exotic, like maybe Bear had worn it and not washed it when he left it for me.

He waited, and I felt a nervous laughter creeping up on me. It was too much. Way too much to explain.

There was maybe a hairbreadth between his knee and mine. In that space, a field of electricity. I wondered if he’d pick up my hand again. It was hard to look him in the eye, and he was watching very intently.

“Um,” I said, and laughed a little. “Sorry, bad habit,” I said.

“I’ve noticed,” Bear said.

“We’re losing our house for taxes,” I said, stroking Buddy’s head, just to have someplace else to look. “And the power and the water are turned off right now.”

“Is it just you and your mom?” he asked.

I looked out the window. It was dark and wet out there, and nothing was visible in the trees or the sky. Like there was no world at all out there.

I couldn’t lie. I’d been lying for five years, and this was the first time I’d felt like I had something to lose. I’d lied to everyone. People in town. People at school, work, the grocery store. People who knew my mom. We never took Birdie out. She’d never been anywhere. Not to a doctor, never in the car. There was no record of her having been born. No hospital stay or midwife. No birth certificate. She spent time outside, but she never ever left my mother’s view. And if my mother had to leave her, on the rare occasion she went to the bank or to buy more drugs, she locked her in the closet with a dim lamp and a coloring book. It was the only safe place for her.