“But you’ve seen me. I’ve been waiting so long. You have to take me back.”

“What about all the others?” I asked. “So many have stayed.”

“They were abandoned. You can’t leave me that way.” She searched my eyes. “It’s good to understand,” she said.

“I know.”

“So, you’re ready?”

I thought of how, when Lee had cried out, he’d had the others with him. Had their comfort and their care. But he was still a child and I was grown up. I was no one’s responsibility anymore. Still, how I wished Liz could be there to hold me. How I wished for Billy’s explanations, and for Julia’s arm in mine, and for Terry’s kindness, his insistence that I belonged.

I was alone. I was frightened.

If only she had never worked in that diner. If only I had been enough. If they’d never let me go, and I had spent the next months safe, practicing the piano, missing my mother, and I had not run out of quarters at the pay phone, and they had not died and left me forever. If not for the nine lost earrings. If not for the late nights by the fire. If not for my wild recklessness, my desperate choice.

“This will hurt,” she said.

“It’s okay,” I lied. “I’m ready.”

She took my hands and stepped in closer, touched her forehead to my forehead, her chest to my chest. I had just found her. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye. The night was blue gray and foggy. Cold and damp. But together we were sharp. Bright. The pain seized me at the heart, radiated outward.

None of us were supposed to be living there, not even Blake. Even if you own the property, no one can live in a skeleton house. Plus, everyone Blake knew was running from something, so the rest of them fled and it was only my mother and me, watching the firefighters at work and giving statements. Only the two of us, standing down the street as the hillside burned. Only me petting her hair when Blake was pronounced dead at the scene and she howled at the moon like the wolves that they were.

Plenty of people came out of their houses, craned their necks to see. The firefighters made quick work of it and the police questioned onlookers and we heard strangers saying that they never liked what was going on over there. How people came and went. We heard someone say something about a woman and a girl, but no one knew it was us.

We kept watching even after the fire was out, after the examiner came, until Blake’s body, zipped in a bag, was loaded into the back of a medical transport van. And then even that was gone.