She took a minute before answering, either working to gather her thoughts or trying to decide if she should tell us. “I put myself places,” she finally said.

Brian looked interested. “You did? What does that mean?”

Her eyes filled with tears, and for a second she almost broke down, but she pulled herself back together. “I traveled outside of myself a lot.”

“Where did you go when you traveled outside yourself?” Brian asked like it was normal to believe you could leave your body and take little trips around the city. I couldn’t wait for the interview to be over. It was making my skin crawl.

She paused. “Home.”

“And what did you do at home?”

Her gaze shifted upstairs. “I watched them sleep.” She smiled like she was watching them now, or maybe it was the memory. “Not Scott. Abbi slept. He walked. I counted his miles.” Scott burst out laughing. Kate let out a small giggle when she heard him from the other room.

He told me his insomnia started after Kate left, but that couldn’t be right because how else would she know that he was up pacing, unable to sleep from stress? Why would he lie about that?

“Doesn’t it say something about how the angels attended to him after he was taken out of the desert?” Brian asked.

“It does.”

“Did the angels attend to you when you were let out?”

“They welcomed me.”

“The angels being the other disciples?”

She nodded.

“What kind of ceremony did they have for you?” he asked. He never let time lapse between questions, as a way to keep her talking.

“A welcome-home one,” she said.

“Welcome home . . . hmm.” He made an exaggerated production of looking around the room, taking in the framed picture of Abbi, Scott, and Kate displayed on the mantel above the fireplace. “But I thought this was your home?”

Scott sat at his desk in the corner, trying to catch up on his emails from work. He was struggling to stay on top of things even though he hadn’t complained about it. His supervisors were completely understanding about our situation and told him to work from home for as long as he needed, but commercial sales wasn’t a job that was easily done from the desk in our bedroom.

He typed while he talked. “I keep trying to put myself in her situation, picture myself there, and I just can’t wrap my brain around what it must have been like to be thrown in a cell and kept in complete isolation for that long. Prisoners go crazy when they’re kept in seclusion rooms, and those guys are hardened criminals. Kate isn’t a wimp, but she’s hardly someone that you’d think could survive in those conditions.”