There’s no point in arguing, and I don’t know why I am. I’m so sick of being the Broken Girl. Why shouldn’t I take the crow girls’ magical help?

I guess it’s just ingrained in me to do it on my own. I’ll take help from my friends because they’re like my family—my real family, the one I chose—but I don’t like reaching beyond them.

But I let Geordie—I was going to say win, or maybe, have his way, but it’s not like that at all. He’s so totally doing it for me. It’s been killing him to see how I’ve been. It’s been killing everybody close to me.

Oh, why am I pretending otherwise? It’s been killing me, too.

But I know the real reason I’m fighting this. I don’t want the crow girls to show up and then do their laying on of hands, or whatever it is that they’ll do, only to find that they still can’t fix me. That everything I went through with Del hasn’t changed anything. That the darkness in me is like a set of those Russian dolls that fit inside each other.

First I thought it was Raylene. Then I found out about Mattie.

What if there’s another shadow? And then another and another and . . .

“Jilly?” Geordie says.

I blink and look at him.

“Right,” I say. “Time to stop stalling.”

So we get dressed.

“Maybe we should call room service and ask for a couple of bowls of sugar,” he says while I’m struggling with my T-shirt.

Sometimes it’s just so hard for me to get my arms up over my head—especially in the morning when I’m the least flexible.

Geordie comes over and gives me a hand.

“Or sugar packets,” I say. “I bet they’d love little sugar packets.”

Geordie ends up going downstairs and comes back with a coffee for each of us and a handful of chocolate bars for them.

“Well?” he says when we’ve finished our coffees.

I nod and set my empty cup on the windowsill. I look out the window at the hills, the sun gleaming bright on the spruce and pine, shadows pooling under their heavy boughs. The light’s amazing, still so focused and almost primal, the way it can be at the beginning or end of the day.

There was a time when I’d be just itching to get it down on paper with a pencil or pastels, yearning to capture that light before it changes, but these days, when the impulse comes to me, the first thing I do is push it away.