This wasn’t how it had happened. I’ve never forgotten that night. We were all so poor in those days—not that we ever got much richer, but at least we weren’t scrabbling from hand-to-mouth as we had been back then. The money she could have gotten for that painting would have paid her rent and art supplies for a month, but she’d insisted I accept it and wouldn’t take no for an answTer.

“But I had to see you again,” she said. “If just one last time.”

“Juh . . . “ I had to clear my throat. “Jilly, what’s going on here?” I finally managed. I laid my fiddle on the table and got up from the chair. “What are you doing in my head?”

“I’m not in your head,” she said. “You’re in mine.”

And when she said those words, that old apartment of mine faded from around us, and we were standing in some empty bedroom with a roof that made a sharp forty-five degree turn halfway across so that the wall on the window side was only half the height of the wall on the other. There were no furnishings except for a bed frame holding a ratty old mattress. The floor was some kind of hardwood, scratched and scuffed, and paint was peeling from the plaster walls. A single unlit bulb hung from the ceiling with a pull chain dangling below it.

“Your . . . I don’t understand . . .”

My voice trailed off as I turned back to her because she was different now, as well. A child stood in front of me, recognizably Jilly, but a Jilly I’d never known. She was ten or eleven, even smaller and thinner than she normally was.

The child gave me a sad shake of her head.

“I know,” she said. It was Jilly’s voice, but a little higher pitched. “It’s all preposterous and stupid and confusing, but somehow I’ve managed to pull my physical self inside my own head and . . . you know how you used to say—when I was carrying on about some mad thing or another—that I must have this happy attic of a brain, just brim full of interesting things?”

I gave a slow nod.

“Well, it turns out it’s not like that at all. It turns out it’s this weird little world where everybody hates me, or just wants to hurt me, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Jilly, you—”

“Oh, I know. I sound pathetic, don’t I? But you don’t know, Geordie. I always thought that with pluck and perseverance, we could all make it through our dark woods to the other side and safety. But that was before I realized that my dark woods are right here inside me. I can’t get away from this, because it’s a part of me and it won’t ever let me go.”

“Everybody carries their past inside them.”