I shook my head. I didn’t know how to explain without telling them everything, and they’d be horrified if I told them the truth. I could have left the skeleton house. I could have left Blake and my mother. I could have found myself help, and made myself a different life—one still of heartache, yes, but not of hauntings.

I had a choice, and I made the wrong one.

They could not know. I would not tell them.

But how could I carry it with me any longer?

I had to get this sick thing outside of me. Had to speak it, but could not tell them. “When I was young,” I said, “I did a horrible thing. And I’m afraid that it’s followed me here.”

I thought it might ruin everything, just speaking those words. Letting them know that I was not perfect. I was not good. They’d realize they were mistaken to have ever thought I was someone to befriend.

But Liz nodded and whispered, “Okay.”

Silence filled the cabin.

Then Billy said, “I had these pains when I got here. Sometimes in my chest, sometimes in my leg. They would shoot up both arms, just all of a sudden.”

Liz listened while he spoke. When he was finished, she said, “I saw horrible things. Nightmare things. When I thought everything was fine, there they would be.”

“Really?” I asked them.

“Yes, really,” they said.

“It’s hard,” Liz said. “It hurts. All of it does. We understand.”

My hands stopped trembling. I shrugged the quilt off my shoulders.

Billy, now warm, slid off his jacket, and I found that he possessed a new kind of beauty with his tired eyes, the curve of his shoulders through his cotton shirt. And Liz, too, with the glow of warm light on her skin, the openness in her face as she watched me. There we were in the first cabin, across the field from everyone else, all by ourselves.

I’d felt so awkward around them, and unfamiliar, and aware of the things I didn’t know. But now a different feeling emerged. One of how they were holding me, even as they sat a distance away. How they were anchoring me to the earth.

“Stay with us,” Liz said. “Stay tonight. Sleep here.”

I had felt so alone, but here were Liz and Billy. Here they were, offering me this.

“If you’re sure,” I told them.

“We’re sure. And I can sleep on the floor if that would be better,” Billy said.

But I wanted warmth. I wanted comfort. So we slept in Liz’s bed, the three of us together, as the night wore on. Such a small space for three fully grown people, with no room for uncertainty. No room for ghosts.

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