She started with a gasp.

“Margaret, honey?” the aunt said louder from the foot of the stairs. “You all right?”

“I’m okay.” Her answer came out wispy. I am not okay. I am not all right. I am not the right one to ask for help. Queasy, clammy, she cupped her damp forehead and scooted back toward the stairs. Her butt hit something. Middlemarch. The check to Carina Applegate was on the floor, too. She grabbed it and scrambled to her feet.

“Well, you’ve been up there frickin’ forever,” the aunt said, her teasing a thin veneer over worry. “Want to come down and have some supper?”

“No. No, thanks.” She glared at the phone from across the room. All she wanted was to be left alone. Why couldn’t she be? Was that asking too much? Just to be left the fuck alone?

She’d scrunched the check. Smoothing it against her stomach with a shaky hand, she turned her back on her cell. “I—I have to run out real quick,” she said from the top of the stairs.

The aunt didn’t say anything for a few seconds. “Where?”

“To the bookstore in Kesley.” She’d go for a drive, a fast drive. Get away. Forget. Delete, delete, delete. “Can I borrow your truck?”

“Well, you can, but … are you sure you don’t want me to drive you?”

“That’s okay. I just have to drop something off. I’ll be back in under an hour.”

Maggie stood in the doorway and looked around, disoriented. The bookstore was packed.

“Excuse us,” a gangly man said. He was herding a small boy in front of him so they could depart single file.

“Oh. Sorry.” She shuffled to the side.

Adults milled around, nodding at one another, smiling politely. Their expressions matched: the cautious friendliness that people wore around others they’d met before but still didn’t know. Children outnumbered the adults and traipsed around the long table, sometimes under it, too.

Maggie was in the way. She hurried toward the magazines and dug the wrinkled check out of her cardigan pocket.

The nosy girl was working again. Standing beside the antique cash register, she handed a customer a bag, then leaned forward so that her hair, this time worn in sleek braids, dangled over the counter. She grinned at the two girls hugging the customer’s legs. “Bye, bye. Be good to your mom.”

“Watch what I can do,” the smaller child said. She stuck out her tongue and touched her chin with it.

“Cool. Can you do this?” The clerk rolled her tongue.

The girls proved they could.

“Excellent. Now, for next Friday, I want you to practice bringing your tongue to your nose.”

The children started practicing right away.

“Try harder,” the clerk murmured.

The mother laughed, raised her bag in a clumsy wave—“See you, Ran”—and nudged the girls toward the door.