She told me how Terry left instructions on the table for us, marked cookbook pages for the recipes he’d chosen. “Sometimes he leaves us cards with recipes,” she said, showing me an index card, stained and water-buckled from use. “This one’s for tonight.”

I took it from her. Carrot soup.

“We make a lot of soup,” she said. “Soup is easy. And see the basket on the counter over there?” On the counter by the sink was a tin bucket of carrots and celery, and next to it a basket full of heads of lettuce, radishes, and onions. “That’s for the salad. Fresh from the garden.”

“Amazing.”

She shrugged. “You get used to it. So, it’s simple tonight. It usually is when Terry leaves us in charge. When he feels like cooking one of his feasts, he joins us and bosses us around. But then he lets us take all the credit. You ready?”

“Yes.”

Side by side at the counter, we worked. I peeled the just-harvested carrots for soup while Liz sliced radishes and onions for salad. We didn’t talk at first, and I wondered if she was disinterested in me, if being assigned to cook with me instead of Billy was a disappointment. I cleared my throat. “So, you’ve been here a year?” I asked her.

She nodded.

“Has everyone been here so long?”

“Lee came a couple months after Billy and me. But otherwise, yeah.”

“It seems nice here. I mean, everyone seems . . . nice.”

“Yeah,” she said. “They are.”

I waited, hopeful, but she didn’t say anything more. I added a carrot to my stack and picked up another. In the quiet between us, I drifted to the poppies on my doorstep the night before. Of the blossoms, how soft and light they had been in my palm when I’d lifted them from my mat. How harmless, how confounding. I’d looked out the window after locking my door, certain Blake would be there, staring back at me. I understood: I had come to live in a haunted place.

And then I flinched. Blood pooled on my finger. I had pushed the peeler too far and cut myself. I didn’t cry out, didn’t say anything, just crossed to the sink to run it under cold water. I thought Liz might not notice, but she disappeared to the bathroom and reappeared next to me with a cotton ball and a bandage. She took my hand and dried it.

“As you feel the pain begin, press it close and count to ten,” she recited, pressing the cotton ball to the cut. “One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . . six . . . seven . . . eight . . . nine . . . ten.” I glanced at her face but felt heat rush to my own. We were so close. I turned my gaze to our hands. We both had short, smoothly filed fingernails. She wore a gold chain around her wrist. My own wrist was bare.