Kateri looks over her shoulder at the tech, who has paled and tells her to be quiet, even though she hasn’t made a sound. Then the tech says it again, louder, to everyone else in the house. Kateri sees Hurt look in and hears him mutter an obscenity.

“Get everyone out for a few minutes,” Kateri says to him, and he starts rounding people up, waving his arms, speaking in a harsh whisper. Flashes go off, and Kateri holds up her hand to block the light. The closet has one dim bulb on a pull chain and no window, no outside light.

She hears the team start to shuffle out, and the house settles to an eerie calm, just the tick of the clock, the quick patter of a leaky faucet. Kateri crouches in the closet, close to the child but not touching. She watches as the girl parts her little fingers, peeking out. She has light eyes. Greenish, like seawater.

TWO: SHANNON

AUGUST

Every town has one. A loner. An outlier. A stranger who doesn’t belong, someone who blew into town, disconnected from the people who have been there for generations. Sometimes the stranger stays and learns to fit in, and after years, no one thinks of them as strange anymore. Sometimes you try to keep them, like catching a young deer, still wobbling on his spindly legs. But at some point, you know they have to go. At some point, you stop holding on so tightly, and the deer follows his instincts. He does what he was born to do.

The last time I saw my father was through safety glass. It took three tries over two days. The first day I walked in there and went through security, I left all my belongings in the car, even the keys, so there wouldn’t be any hitches at all. And the guard said, “No visitors.”

“I’m sorry, what?” I asked him.

“Park Jenkins. No visitors,” he repeated.

“I’m his son,” I said. I was there on my own, without my mother knowing. I’d driven three hours to look him in the eye. Even if I didn’t say anything to him, I wanted to look him in the eye.

The guard tried to look past me. He was big. Six inches taller than I was and about three of me wide. I saw him blink.

“Come back tomorrow, kid,” he said.

I knew what my father looked like from pictures. I remembered living in the farmhouse, but I didn’t remember living with him. We moved into the woods when I was three, when the farmhouse burned down. When my father, Park Jenkins, set it on fire and tried to kill all three of us, himself included. What I knew was the story my mother had told me, about the falling beams, about the staircase on fire, about crawling out to the front porch, which was crumbling above us as we went. I remembered her story but not the event. I carried the trauma on my body in the form of scars. As if trying to kill me wasn’t enough. I had damage anyone could see, anyone could feel with their hands. A scar on one shoulder that spread over the blade and up onto my clavicle, the skin wrinkled like a wadded-up piece of paper. It was mostly covered in a T-shirt.