Her second misfortune was that the insurance company was blowing them off. They had sent out a number of inspectors to examine the house but they had yet to make a decision about how much, if any, the policy would pay out. If any! That house was teeming with mold! Well, maybe it was. There might be a little mold. Most houses had at least a little mold, didn’t they? She called the office daily, but it seemed as though a new agent, unfamiliar with the case, answered every time, forcing her to go over the story again and again like a recording. She threatened to come to the local insurance office and raise hell, but they were evasive about their location. Thus she, like Sisyphus, was condemned to push her boulder up the mountain—for eternity, she feared.

Misfortune number three: the town had turned down their request to rebuild the house before the moratorium expired. Were they complete idiots? Didn’t they read the articles she gave them about the dangers of mold? They didn’t know there wasn’t any. Only she, Nick, and Grant knew that, and they were keeping their mouths shut. She’d forwarded dozens of links in addition to having her research spiral-bound at the copy center to make the information easier to read, a copy for the mayor and each town council member, as well as a stack for the insurance company, which they’d requested she send to their main office in Michigan, where they probably had a bonfire with them. She would have given them Adam’s health file, but the latest results—either luckily, or unluckily, depending on how you looked at it—did not further her case.

The allergist’s skin-prick tests showed that Adam had a slight sensitivity to eggplants and cashews, which might possibly have explained the headaches if he ate eggplant or cashews, but he didn’t. “What about environmental allergies?” Suzanne had asked the doctor at the follow-up appointment.

“Nothing.” He showed Suzanne the section on grasses and trees on Adam’s results.

“What about mold?”

“Nope.”

“Dust?”

“No.”

“Lead paint?” Suzanne asked.

“That’s not an allergy.”

“But there might be some allergens you missed, some rare ones?”

“This is a pretty comprehensive list.”

Suzanne had stood up, realization tumbling down on her. She yanked the test results from the doctor’s hands. “Are there other copies of this?”

“That one’s for you to keep.”

“I want the file on the computer.”

“We’d be glad to send a copy to his pediatrician.”

“Don’t you dare!” Suzanne said.

The doctor took a step backward, his eyes shifting uneasily toward the door. Rightly so. When Suzanne looked down at her hands, she saw that they were fists.