“I love your hair,” Shelley says. “It is so soft.”

She continues rinsing my hair as she talks. Her touch is firmer, not quite as gentle as Jack’s.

“Where’s Jack?” I ask.

“He’s around somewhere. Penny, you’re so impressive to me,” she says. “So independent, so strong.”

“I’m not sure you can say that about an old lady who needs help washing.”

“We all need help. None of us can do anything without others. It’s your spirit I’m talking about. Your attitude. And your work ethic. Your painting.”

“My painting?”

“I saw what you’re working on. You’re so talented.”

My heart stops. How could she have seen it? I only started it last night. And I hid it, didn’t I? I don’t like this. It’s an intrusion.

“You looked at my painting?” I ask.

She nods.

“It’s personal,” I say. “Private.”

“We don’t like to have secrets here. We’re such a small group, and I want to know all about you.”

She wraps my hair in a towel. It’s constricting and pulling at my hair. She wheels my chair to the mirror on the wall.

She knows so much about me, my work, my life. But I know nothing about her.

“Who are you?” I ask.

She takes a step backward, her head cocked to one side. “What do you mean?”

“Jack told me a bit about you. He said you were an academic. How does an academic end up managing an old-age home?”

I can tell from her expression that Jack wasn’t supposed to tell me this.

“We’re not an old-age home, Penny. We’re a small-scale assisted-living facility. And I’m not sure what Jack’s been saying. Before I started Six Cedars, I studied science.”

“What kind of science?”

“Organic chemistry, biology. If you’d asked me in grad school what I wanted to do with my life, I would have said become a speculative biologist.”

“Speculative biologist? My father loved to read about science and would often buy me books on various topics, but I’ve never heard of that.”

“Biology in particular is very under-theorized. It’s still mainly based in observation and experiment. I’m more attracted to the theoretical.”

“The theoretical?” I say.

“Especially when it comes to boundaries. The natural world is much more lax about borders than people think.” She sounds excited, candid, much less formal than she has since I’ve arrived.

“How so?” I ask.

“Well, there are so many examples. Do you know what lichens are?”

“That green stuff that grows on tree bark?”

“Yes, but lichen isn’t a singular entity. They’re a symbiotic fusion of algae and fungi. It’s amazing. But their union is so extreme that they perform as one, as lichens.”

Symbiotic fusion?

“Perform as one?” I ask, struggling to follow her thought flow.

“As in one individual. And so when you start getting deeper into it, you wonder if you should be discussing a single organism or many. Is it me or is it us? It’s like reindeer cyclones. Are they one or many? A swirling group of reindeer walking in a tight circle, which they’ll do if threatened, so any one individual can’t be targeted. Imagine if we could all be linked like this, how much better off we’d be.”