An hour before dawn, Melanie goes back to the big house to finish her night on the living room sofa. When Daniel gets up, he’ll be sure to see her and not go looking for her in the playhouse.

Rose more passes out than falls asleep.

When she wakes, groggy and disoriented, sunlight is streaming through the child-sized windows, making bright streaks on the cushions and blankets. In daylight Rose notices the walls are a riot of flowers, monkeys, birds, and foliage.

Images of her tracing the shapes, helping Mel to paint the colors in, the both of them splotched with paint, both intent on their work, return to her. Good memories. Mel was ten, Rose sixty-five; Izzy and Harley alive.

The foggy oblivion of drugs—or something—continues to obscure the time between Harley’s death and waking up on the greenway in a hospital gown. Now she is in a playhouse, in a mangled pink nightie. This is what progress looks like, she decides, and begins neatly folding the blankets and stacking them in a corner.

“Gigi, it’s me.” Mel ducks in through the little door, her arms full. “Breakfast,” she says, and drops a package of iced cinnamon rolls and a bottle of water on the folded blankets.

While Rose eats—ravenously, as it happens—Mel talks. “Uncle Dan’s gone to work. He’s assistant manager at a Starbucks at the moment. Stella’s gone. I don’t care where, as long as she stays there.”

Stella, if Rose remembers correctly, does favors for rich friends. In recompense they give her “gifts.” The favors cover everything from picking up dry cleaning to driving drunken clowns home from botched children’s parties.

“I got you these.” Melanie unwads a pair of tattered jeans and an equally disreputable T-shirt and drapes them on the pillows. “They should fit okay, though I think I outgrew you this year.”

“I shrank,” Rose manages around a hunk of sugary dough.

“Flip-flops and, absolutely necessary when traveling incognito, a ball cap.”

“Go Panthers,” Rose says.

“This way, if any of the neighbors see you leaving, they’ll think you’re nobody, one of my friends.”

“I’m impressed. You really thought things through. You have the makings of a fine criminal mind,” Rose says.

“Crime doesn’t pay,” Melanie says unctuously.

“Not as well as it used to,” Rose agrees.

Rose licks her fingers clean. Pinching up the ball cap by its brim, she dumps out the contents. “Underpants!” she exclaims in delight. “You wonderful child. I cannot tell you how much I have been craving a pair of good old cotton underpants.”

“And just when I was beginning to think you weren’t demented,” Mel says. “They’re—they were—Mom’s.”

“I am deeply honored,” Rose says sincerely and, still chewing, wriggles into the panties.

“Mom’s bras would be too big for you,” Mel adds.