And I let her lead me away.

___

An hour later, I emerged from the downstairs bathroom, the taste of ash still faintly in my mouth despite the new toothbrush and paste Julia had given me. I had brushed twice, scrubbed my tongue, but it wouldn’t go away.

Still, I was calmer. I was clean, my skin warm from the bath Julia had drawn for me, scented by the lavender-and-rosemary bath salts she’d made. The kitchen floor had been washed and the house was quiet. Terry sat alone at the table.

He looked up as I crossed the floor.

“Let’s sit,” he said, and we went into the living room together. I sat on the easy chair and he took a place across from me on the sofa. He clasped his hands. “So,” he said. “The fire?”

I nodded. I wanted it to make sense—all of it. The scent of the coins on my hand, the cut on my foot, the poppies and the earrings and the ash . . . but the harder I grasped for logic, the more clouded everything became. I would return to this one thing, Terry’s question. The fire.

“Why—” I started. “Why would it be inside me?”

He started to speak and then stopped himself. “I wish I had the answers,” he said. But his words didn’t feel right. Or, more than that, they didn’t feel like enough.

“Why do you bring us here?” I asked.

“The farm healed Julia and me. We were lost when we came here. We found our way back to each other, to ourselves. It’s healed so many people. It can do that for you, too. If you let it.”

I shook my head. Looked at my hands, clasped together on my lap.

“I feel like it’s destroying me,” I said.

He turned away from me, toward the dark window. I did the same, and saw our reflection: Terry and me, together. No longer strangers. And then I heard footsteps from their bedroom. Julia was here now, hair in a braid, dressed in flannel for bed.

“How are you feeling?” she asked. The concern in her eyes, the way she looked at me so carefully—she wanted me here. I was wrapped in the midnight-blue robe she had laid out for me the hour before. Before she’d left me to undress, she’d kissed me on the cheek, not minding the ash-vomit in my hair.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You’ll get through this, Mila,” Terry said.

“Trust us,” Julia said.

I wished they could know how difficult it was. How near to impossible. Wished I could hand them my memories, intact, so they could see the earrings and the shells and the ways that I had been tricked. So they could see Lorna and how purely I’d believed in her. Oh, they would say. I see.