It is summer, hot and humid. Mel is a long-legged little girl of seven. Harley, Rose’s husband, white hair glued to his forehead under a battered straw hat, draws a claw hammer from the leather tool belt around his waist. Mel, practically dancing with excitement, smiles and holds out sixpenny nails for her granddad, her palms up as if making an offering to a god.

Izzy, Mel’s mom, and Rose sit on a blanket in the shade laughing. It’s a hobbit gate, Izzy tells Mel. “Like in Lord of the Rings. When you go through it, I’ll bet you’ll be in Middle-earth.”

“That’s silly,” Mel says, her maturity offended. Then she turns to Rose. “Isn’t it, Gigi?”

“Stranger things have happened,” Rose says with a wink at Izzy, her step-daughter-in-law.

“Daddy?” Mel calls on the ultimate source of what is real and what is not. Flynn, Harley’s elder son and Rose’s stepson, is several yards away talking on his cell phone. “Whatever your mom says, punkin’.”

“This is so you can look out and see who’s there,” Harley says, fitting a mesh he’s made of copper strips into a rectangle cut in the wood at Bilbo Baggins’s eye level. “That way nobody can come in that you don’t want to. See. You just slide this little door open.”

Mel slides the minute copper door aside and peeks out through the little mesh window.

“Do you see Gandalf?” Izzy calls.

Rose neither moves nor breathes for fear the door will vanish. A moment passes, and another. The door does not disappear into Middle- earth. She stands, curls her fingers around the handle. It is real, cool against her palm. She presses the thumb lever down. A prosaic click of metal on metal lets her know the latch lifted. Mel must have forgotten to lock it. Probably she’d ridden home from the facility with someone. What with Gigi slapping orange juice all over orderlies, and screaming about poison plots, latching the back gate must have slipped her mind.

Rose’s debilitating fatigue abates slightly. The pain in hands, legs, and feet no longer matters. Hope is better than opioids. She opens the gate, ducks through, closes it, and locks it behind her. Leaning against the wood, she feels momentarily safe.

She has escaped; she has reached Mel’s backyard. Like a dog chasing cars, now that she has secured her goal, she doesn’t know what to do with it. Flynn, Mel’s father, must have been the one who put her in the facility. Her stepson has not visited her that she is aware of. He has not come to free her. The idea of putting her life in anyone else’s hands is frightening. Rose decides not to expose herself, not yet.