I planned to ask Del if he would do us the same favor he’d done for his own family, remove our wrist counters and replace them with decoys, but I haven’t. Not yet. A small voice keeps reminding me of Steven. He’s drunk every flavor of Kool-Aid the Pure has handed him. Also, the twins might blurt something out, reveal the secret at school. I can’t risk that.

As we drive, the landscape changes from rural to suburban. All those houses, I think, are little prisons, and inside them are cells in the shape of kitchens and laundry closets and bedrooms. Morgan’s words come back to me, his matter-of-fact talk about how things were better before, long ago, when men worked and women stayed in their private sphere of cookery and cleaning and baby making.

I don’t think I really believed it would happen. I don’t think any of us did.

After the election, we started believing. Some of us became vocal for the first time. Women, for the most part, spearheaded the anti-Myers campaign—women like me, who hadn’t ever tried on a pair of marching boots, piled into buses and Metro cars and froze in the Washington winter. There were men, too, I remember. Barry and Keith, who had three decades between them of fighting for gay rights, spent a Saturday painting signs at their house two doors down from ours; five of the graduate students from my department said they had our backs. And they did, for a while.

It’s hard to pinpoint what—or whom—we were protesting. Sam Myers was a terrible choice for the chief executive. Young and inexperienced in big-time politics, his military training a one-year ROTC stint from college days, Myers ran his presidential race with a crutch under each arm. Bobby, his older brother and a career senator, supplied the practical advice. There was a shit ton of that, I’m guessing. The other crutch was Reverend Carl, the vote supplier, the man people listened to. Anna Myers, pretty and popular, didn’t hurt the campaign, although in the end, it hurt her. Plenty.

Our only real hope had been the Supreme Court. But with one empty seat on an already right-leaning bench and two more retirements looming, the Supremes didn’t offer much hope. Even now, I’m told it will take months for the handful of restraining orders to make their way through the labyrinthine system. If they make it at all.