“So normal,” I repeated.

“It always smelled so good!” Jessie rhapsodized. “Fresh bread and lavender!”

“Did it?”

“The smell was just baked into the walls or something.”

I couldn’t meet Jessica’s eye. I was thinking about my childhood compared to hers. How my mother had summarily pushed her out, and how I had barely shrugged over the loss of the friendship that had once been my obsession. I had, after that is your pussy, instinctively understood and agreed with my mother’s judgment.

“And she was so beautiful,” continued Jessie. “She just seemed so decent and good.”

“I know,” I said.

“I think I was kind of in love with her,” said Jessica.

“I know,” I said again. “And what did you think of Kelli?”

“I loved Kelli!” I knew she would say this. “Kelli seemed so cool to me! Oh my god, I would’ve killed for a sister.”

“Well, Kelli wasn’t a sister in the traditional sense.”

“Well, I would’ve killed for a Kelli,” said Jessica. “I used to ask my mother if you and Kelli could stay overnight . . .” Jessica stopped smiling at this memory and looked up at me. “Anyway, I know it’s been hard. I don’t mean to idealize you. I’m just saying I did when I was a kid. You and your family. It was important, that time I spent with you guys. You gave me a model of how it was supposed to be. I’m very grateful for that.”

Jessica Hendy spoke about gratitude a lot, almost compulsively, like an OCD person who keeps glancing at the stove. Gazing at Jessica and her groomed eyebrows, her clear-­varnished fingernails — inhaling her floral, lighter-than-air perfume — a bizarre thought occurred to me. That Jessica Hendy, after a childhood of nightmares, had built herself a persona — put herself together, as it were — in an unconscious, or maybe conscious, replication of my mother. My mother and her ordered, tasteful world. She had idealized it to such an extent that even Kelli, rocking in her perch by the window, seemed part and parcel with the magic, a grace note in the midst of Irene Petrie’s lovely composition.

“And how is Kelli?” said Jessica.

“Kelli,” I said, “is eternal. She hasn’t changed.”

“Does she still like to feel your forehead for fever?”

“She still does that,” I said, and Jessica bared her news anchor’s teeth in a smile, loving to hear it.

“She still does all the things she used to do,” I said. “Every day for the last forty years.”

“Karen,” said Jessie. “It’s going to be so hard for you to let her go!”

She was talking about Seaside. Or Gorsebrook. I hadn’t decided yet. Which was crazy, because I should have had Kelli tucked into Seaside well before now. I was supposed to be wrapping things up and heading home in just a few days. Obviously that wasn’t going to happen. Obviously I would have to call my expectant clients and let them know I’d need more time. But I hadn’t even done that yet. I’d done nothing. The end of the month felt like the outer limits of an ancient map, where the uncharted world was unthinkable, a vague place of vague monsters. I couldn’t seem to get my head around what had to happen next, couldn’t rouse myself to action.