Julia squeezed my knee under the table.

Sometimes, I was so close to being one of them. So convincing, I almost convinced myself.

___

I sat with Ruby and Diamond at dinnertime and afterward I read them a book by the fire. When Julia was ready to take them upstairs, I was part relieved, part distressed to see Billy and Liz were gone already.

But they were waiting for me outside of my cabin. I walked in and they followed. We stood inside together, the three of us, silent. Billy by the stove, Liz leaning against the desk, me in the center of the room. I felt the prick of tears, tried to fight them.

“Mila,” Liz said. “We wanted you to know . . . last night wasn’t what it looked like. It wasn’t . . . bad.”

“Then what was it?”

“We want to make sure you know we’re here for you,” Billy said. “What you’re going through—we don’t want you to be alone.”

“But I wasn’t alone,” I said. “I was with you. And then you snuck away and you did something to Lee and I don’t even know who you are.”

“No,” Liz said. “We didn’t do anything to him. You don’t understand.”

“Then tell me! I cook and I clean. I wake up at five a.m. with you and work the stand and I like it. I live surrounded by ghosts. I sleep in your bed. I love Lee and I’m as good to him as I know how to be. What else do I need to do?”

“Mila.” Liz pulled me close. She pressed her lips against my cheek and my heart gave me away. My eyes fluttered shut. To be touched like this, to be kissed by her. Billy stepped behind me, wrapped his arms around me.

I heard him murmur into my hair, “It’s okay, Mila.”

“You’re one of us,” Liz said.

But at her words, my body went stiff. I opened my eyes to my cabin, and I didn’t know why I was standing there, why these bodies were pressed against me. On my wall was the watercolor of Lee and me, the only thing I owned that meant anything.

“I need to be alone,” I told them. And they let me go.

___

Hours later, alone in my cabin, all I could think of was Lee. The way he’d cradled the little ghost. His scream and his cries. I needed to see him. And I felt that he couldn’t possibly be sleeping. Whatever happened must have unsettled him enough that he’d be, at the very least, fitful and in and out of dreams. I went to my window and looked across the field to the house. A faint light glowed from his upstairs bedroom.