February Upcoming Books –– Romance in the Air, New Books in Bookshelves

Today is the Ritual of Purity.

The thought nervously circles in my head as I hurry toward the barn, gathering my cloak to ward off the cold. It’s early morning, and the sun hasn’t yet begun its climb above the snow-dusted trees encircling our small farmhouse. Shadows gather in the darkness, crowding the weak pool of light cast by my lamp. An ominous tingling builds under my skin. It’s almost as if there’s something there, at the edge of my vision…

It’s just nerves, I tell myself. I’ve felt the tingling many times before and never once seen anything strange.

The barn door is open when I arrive, a lantern hung at the post. Father is already inside, spreading hay. He’s a frail figure in the darkness, his tall body sunken into itself. Just three months ago, he was hearty and robust, his blond hair untouched by gray. Then the red pox came, sickening him and Mother. Now he’s stooped and faded, with the rheumy eyes and wispy hair of someone decades older.

“You’re already awake,” he says softly, gray eyes flitting over me.

“I couldn’t sleep any longer,” I reply, grabbing a milk pail and heading toward Norla, our largest cow.

I’m supposed to be resting in isolation, like all the other girls preparing for the Ritual, but there’s too much work to do around the farm and not enough hands. There hasn’t been since Mother died three months ago. The thought brings tears to my eyes, and I blink them away.

Father forks more hay into the stalls. “ ‘Blessings to he who waketh to witness the glory of the Infinite Father,’ ” he grunts, quoting from the Infinite Wisdoms. “So, are you prepared for today?”

I nod. “Yes, I am.”

Later this afternoon, Elder Durkas will test me and all the other sixteen-year-old girls during the Ritual of Purity. Once we’re proven pure, we’ll officially belong here in the village. I’ll finally be a woman—eligible to marry, have a family of my own.

The thought sends another wave of anxiety across my mind.

I glance at Father from the corner of my eye. His body is tense; his movements are labored. He’s worried too. “I had a thought, Father,” I begin. “What if… what if…” I stop there, the unfinished question lingering heavily in the air. An unspeakable dread, unfurling in the gloom of the barn.

Father gives me what he thinks is a reassuring smile, but the edges of his mouth are tight. “What if what?” he asks. “You can tell me, Deka.”

“What if my blood doesn’t run pure?” I whisper, the horrible words rushing out of me. “What if I’m taken away by the priests—banished?”

I have nightmares about it, terrors that merge with my other dreams, the ones where I’m in a dark ocean, Mother’s voice calling out to me.

“Is that what you’re worried about?”

I nod.

Even though it’s rare, everyone knows of someone’s sister or relative who was found to be impure. The last time it happened in Irfut was decades ago—to one of Father’s cousins. The villagers still whisper about the day she was dragged away by the priests, never to be seen again. Father’s family has been shadowed by it ever since.

That’s why they’re always acting so holy—always the first in temple, my aunts masked so even their mouths are hidden from view. The Infinite Wisdoms caution, “Only the impure, blaspheming, and unchaste woman remains revealed under the eyes of Oyomo,” but this warning refers to the top half of the face: forehead to the tip of the nose. My aunts, however, even have little squares of sheer cloth covering their eyes.

When Father returned from his army post with Mother at his side, the entire family disowned him immediately. It was too risky, accepting a woman of unknown purity, and a foreigner at that, into the family.

Then I came along—a child dark enough to be a full Southerner but with Father’s gray eyes, cleft chin, and softly curled hair to say otherwise.

I’ve been in Irfut my entire life, born and raised, and I’m still treated like a stranger—still stared and pointed at, still excluded. I wouldn’t even be allowed in the temple if some of Father’s relatives had their way. My face may be the spitting image of his, but that’s not enough. I need to be proven for the village to accept me, for Father’s family to accept us. Once my blood runs pure, I’ll finally belong.

Father walks over, smiles reassuringly at me. “Do you know what being pure means, Deka?” he asks.

I reply with a passage from the Infinite Wisdoms. “ ‘Blessed are the meek and subservient, the humble and true daughters of man, for they are unsullied in the face of the Infinite Father.’ ”

Every girl knows it by heart. We recite it whenever we enter a temple—a constant reminder that women were created to be helpmeets to men, subservient to their desires and commands.

“Are you humble and all the other things, Deka?” Father asks.

I nod. “I think so,” I say.

Uncertainty flickers in his eyes, but he smiles and kisses my forehead. “Then all will be well.”

He returns to his hay. I take my seat before Norla, that worry still niggling at me. After all, there are other ways I resemble Mother that Father does not know about—ways that would make the villagers despise me even more if they ever found out.

I have to make sure I keep them secret. The villagers must never find out.

Never.

“You can’t react.” Mom smooths her hair for the forty-­seventh time since we parked in the public garage a block away from the courthouse. Now we sit in the freezing car. Waiting. “No matter what. All the cameras—­”

“I know.”

“Don’t snap at your mother, Marianne.”

I watch the slice of Papi’s face in the rearview mirror. The fresh gray at his temples, the new lines around his eyes. Weary would be a specific word choice.

They’re so afraid, my larger-­than-­life parents. Shrinking into themselves for nearly a year, layering on armor that doesn’t even protect them. Retreating when they should have been on the front lines. With me.

My fury begins to unfurl, deep down. If I stay trapped in their inaction, it will spill out, blazing hot, and scorch them until their skin blisters, the seats of this ancient car melt, the whole thing burns down.

“I have to stretch my legs.”

I bolt from the car before they can object.

They would object. They want to keep me close, muzzle me, don’t write your columns about the case, Marianne, don’t be so outspoken, Em, don’t, don’t, don’t.

Outside the car, I’m free of their crushing inaction but I’m boxed in by the dark, low ceilings of the parking garage, the stench of furtive smoke breaks, urine, and gasoline seeped into concrete that’ll never be washed clean.

I walk toward the hazy light of the exit to the street. Every step I take away from the car, I know my mom is fretting. We’re supposed to wait for Layla! Walk in together. United front!

But the slick sidewalk grounds me, the damp air, the concrete and steel fading into skies that are yet another shade of gray. This is my Seattle. I dig a dollar out of my pocket and hand it to the guy huddled in the opposite corner of the parking garage entrance.

Mom can still see me from the car. And I can see the courthouse down the block. It was imposing at first. Now, after so many months, I yawn at the building. The way my sister’s tabby always yawned his ambivalence about human existence. Until he got hit by a car, at which point he was probably less ambivalent.

Across the street, a guy immersed in his phone looks up, leers. Does he recognize me from the trial coverage? Or is he a dime-­a-­dozen dirtbag?

I hold his gaze until he looks away.

Dirtbag, then. The trial never looks away.

Even after it’s over—­so soon, it will be over—­its gaze will linger.

A car pulls into the garage and I catch a glimpse of Layla’s hijab, bright orange in the dull beige of her ancient station wagon. Nor pulls in right behind Layla, as though the victim advocate took her job so seriously she escorted my sister all the way from campus. Really, we’re all here at the same time by horrible circumstance.

Papi climbs out of our car and heads around to open Mom’s door like he always does, but she bursts out on her own.

“Good morning.” Layla’s voice echoes in the parking garage and I flinch at the slam of her car door. “How are we doing?”

Papi gives her a tight smile and nod, but Mom can’t rip her eyes off my sister’s car. She’s fighting every instinct she has to race over, throw open Nor’s door, and yank her out into her arms. I know, because I’m doing the same thing.

“We’re okay,” I say. “How are you?”

Layla gives her familiar smile, the one we’ve seen for months. It manages to be warm and supportive, while never dismissing the reason she’s in our lives. “One of my neighbor’s new chickens has turned out to be a rooster,” she says. “But aside from that I can’t complain.”

When this is all over, I’ll send Layla a thank-­you for all the time she spent answering my questions about legal procedures, and what all the various charges meant. The difference between “indecent liberties” and “assault with sexual motivation.” If I could make sure my high school paper got it right, the Seattle Times reporters could have spent a bit more time critiquing how our system works and less time weeping over the lost potential of Craig Lawrence’s future.

Nor still doesn’t get out of the car. My parents wanted to pick her up, arrive together. But they didn’t insist when she said she’d drive herself. She needs to feel like she’s in control, Mom said, like we haven’t all read the same books and websites about supporting survivors.

Mom starts toward Nor’s car, but Layla places a gentle hand on her arm. “Give her a minute?”

Layla’s as badass as they come but she doesn’t need to talk like an alpha male to get my mom to listen. I could throat-­punch every armchair pundit who criticized Nor’s uptalk in the one interview she gave—­and the defense attorney for defining her speech patterns as “hesitant.”

When Nor finally emerges, though, Mom doesn’t hold herself back. Layla doesn’t stop her—­she’s Nor’s advocate, not her bodyguard. She doesn’t like to be touched anymore, I want to scream as Mom fusses over ­Elinor’s everything. Perfect collar, perfect hair, perfect cheeks. If everything looks perfect, maybe we won’t shatter into a million irretrievable pieces.

I pull my hair out of its ponytail, let the wind rip through it. My lungs seize in the unusually cold air and I breathe deep to spite it.

In the midst of Mom’s hovering, Nor catches my eye. I tell myself she’s going to roll her eyes any second. Classic Mom, right? We’re going to share a moment like always, Em and Nor, Nor and Em, they basically share a brain.

But before the moment can flicker into a flame, Layla clears her throat. “All right. Everybody ready?” A flame never stood a chance in this wind anyway.

I opened my eyes, and I was on the train.

I was the only passenger left. How long had I been asleep? I looked down to make sure I still had my things: my straw hat, my suitcase stamped with the letter Z. I’d hung on to them this whole way, through sleeping on a bench in Penn Station and sprinting to catch a train in Boston, ever since I’d left Saint Brigid’s School for Young Ladies this time yesterday. Thinking about it, I ran my tongue over my teeth again. No matter how many times I did it, I could still taste copper.

The door at the far end of the car clattered open, and I jumped. Just the conductor, coming down the aisle to check on me. He looked nervously down at me, and I felt guilty, wondering if he could tell I was on the run.

“You the stop in Winterport?” he said. I nodded. His eyes had wandered down to my suitcase.

“You got people there?” he asked. “I’m kin of the Hannafins, myself.”

People up here were like this, I remembered suddenly. Always wanting to know about your family. “The Zarrins,” I offered.

He twitched like a rabbit before settling himself back down. “I thought you might be,” he said. “They don’t leave Winterport much, do they?”

“I did,” I said. “I haven’t been back in eight years.”

Once I said it I froze, terrified he’d ask me why I was coming back now. I rummaged frantically in my mind for a convincing lie. But he just smiled at me tightly and touched his hat.

“We’ll just be slowing down, not a full stop,” he said. “Don’t worry, people do it all the time. When the whistle blows the first time, get ready.”

He disappeared, and I stared out the window and watched the landscape for a while. It had been almost summer in Maryland, but as we rumbled across the bridge that divides New Hampshire from Maine, I saw a few stubborn patches of snow clinging on beneath the pine trees. I’d been angry when I’d gotten on the train, and that had kept me in motion. But the weather chilled my anger and crystallized it into fear. Maybe there were good reasons I wasn’t supposed to be at home. I had a vague, half-remembered feeling that it wasn’t exactly safe. It all felt faded and vaguely ridiculous. None of it seemed plausible when I held it up to the light. But if it was true, if I was right, then I needed to be home again.

After all, there was no other place for me in the world. Not after what I’d done.

Lucy Spencer flashed in my mind for a moment then. Her red hair coming out of its braid, her face twisted in that expression people make right before they start screaming—

And then the whistle was blowing. Get ready, he’d said. I hefted my suitcase, clapped my hat on my head. Time to go visit my family.

The conductor came back to open the door for me as the train slowed. He couldn’t even look me in the eye. He mumbled something that sounded like “Be careful,” and then we were rumbling slowly past a platform, and I was stepping out into the air.

I felt a jarring, sickening sensation of the world rising up to meet me. I staggered, let go of the suitcase, and hit one knee on the wood of the platform, the train still trundling behind me. I crawled away from it, feeling like I’d been in an accident. It was moving faster than I’d thought, when I was on it.

I told myself not to be weak. I made sure I hadn’t scraped my knee; I didn’t want anyone around here to see my blood. I got to my feet, checked to make sure my suitcase hadn’t popped open in the fall, and took a moment to get my bearings.

The platform was deserted. Beyond it the single cobbled street of the town bent like an elbow out into the ocean, with houses lining the crook. Along the water were docks where fishing boats bobbed up and down at their moorings. The sun was going down behind the tree-covered hills, bathing the town in alternating stripes of red light and shadow. Three young boys knelt in the street, their hand-me-down coats straining threadbare over their backs.

I found myself watching them closely, my eyes locked on them. They were using a stick to try to loosen one of the cobblestones. One of them looked up and saw me, and froze. I watched him reach down as though he thought if he moved slowly enough I wouldn’t see him. His dirty fingers scrabbled at the edges of the stone until he held it in his hand. I saw his fingers clamp shut around it, and I saw the muscles in his shoulder begin to tense. I tensed, too, sinking down lower, ready to duck or run forward. It was like he knew me. Like he knew what I’d done.

“You there!”

An old man hobbled out of a store, waving a walking stick. The boys scattered, tearing off across the cobbles.

I shuddered like someone being woken up from a dream. The man brandished the stick halfheartedly after the boys, but it seemed like he’d already forgotten them as he turned to look at me up on the platform, shielding his eyes to see me more clearly. I clambered down to meet him. He was bent at the shoulder, his blue eyes cloudy with age, and he wore a clerical collar.

“Ah, young Eleanor,” he said.

“I … I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t think I know you.”

“Father Thomas,” he said. “Your grandmother didn’t want to introduce you to me until you were older.” He had the same sharp, staccato accent as the man on the train. “But I know about all of you.” He winked. I blushed, not quite knowing why, wondering what it was exactly that he knew.

“Well, thank you for … chasing them off.”

“My job. Pastor of Saint Anthony in Winterport. Here to help the lost.” He chuckled a little to himself. “Do you need directions up to the house?”

“I think I remember. Who were they?”

“Oh, them? Kids from town,” he said. “They don’t understand that you’re safe enough. I suspect there’s something instinctual that makes ’em want to throw rocks at Zarrins.”

His matter-of-factness chilled me. But I’d known my family was dangerous, so why was I surprised that other people knew it, too?

“I don’t think they’re expecting me,” I said. “Will that be a problem?”

“The Zarrins have never much liked unexpected company,” he said. “But they are expecting you. Your grandma sent Margaret down this morning with a note, asked me to greet you.”

I hadn’t seen that coming.

“I’ll walk you as far as the church,” he said.

He offered to take my suitcase, but I said I’d manage. He hitched along beside me, leaning on his cane. The whole way I thought I spotted people watching us—a twitch of lace curtains at a window, a rustle as though someone had just ducked behind a hedge. It was almost funny. But then when we got to the weathered clapboard church, and he went away up the path and in through the door, nothing about it seemed funny anymore. I was alone.

At the edge of town, the road went nearly straight up a steep incline into a copse of silver birch. The climb was hard; my suitcase banged against my already bruised leg, and I started carrying it in my arms. The wind curled through the trees, blowing through my uniform until I couldn’t stop shivering.

A car crawled along behind me for a while, and then passed me at a crest when the road widened. At school, cars would honk at us as we walked in groups; boys would lean out and ask us if we wanted a ride and the nuns would yell at them to leave us alone. Not here. I wondered if the driver recognized me, or just the direction I was walking.

I came to the place where the road forked. To the right, it became a bridge that spanned a narrow sound and traveled onward up the coast. To the left, a dirt road that darted directly up the steep slope into the deep woods. Trees made a tunnel overhead. It was beautiful up there, in the darkening forest, but I sensed that it was not a place to be caught alone at night. I bent my knees and adjusted my gait to move silently, then crept forward.

Birds sang here, and wild creatures rustled in the bushes. My ears pricked at the small sounds. The geography settled into place around me. To my right down the tree-lined slope: a streambed that carried a torrent of meltwater every spring, eventually pouring off a cliff into the sea. A little to one side of that, there was a line in the woods where it transitioned from birch to aspen. And a little farther up the path, visible in glimpses as I climbed steadily, was the front lawn. I rounded a bend, and the trees fell away, and all that remained was the house.

It loomed over the landscape. Towers and porches and balconies and bay windows. Story after story of decorative gingerbreading, crown molding, sunburst emblems, recessed niches, and high gables, and all of it covered in gray scalloped shingles, like scales, and at the very top of the highest tower, the creaking weathervane in the shape of a running rabbit. It was hard to look at: not all of it fit in my view at once, even after I took a few steps back. I realized that now, it scared me. It was too much. It felt oppressive, a giant squatting at the top of the world.

I stared the house down, willing it to blink its windows first. And then I took a few quick steps across the narrow band of lawn, planted my foot deliberately on the first step, and launched myself up to the door.

It was black. Not painted: black wood, with twisted carvings and a brass horsehead with a ring clenched in its teeth. I lifted the ring and let it fall.

No answer for a long moment. Behind me the wind ran up my spine and made me shiver. I reached for the knob and threw the door open.

A moan filled the air, a window open somewhere that pulled the air from the door through the house, turning the front hall into a throat. As soon as I stepped forward into the house, suction yanked the door shut behind me and the sound of the ocean sloughing against the cliffs on the far side of the house faded to a whisper. Other than that, there was no sound, except for somewhere down the hall, a heavy clock ticking.

I looked around with heart pumping, my hands locked around my suitcase. The entry hall soared two and a half stories, the ceiling lost in darkness somewhere overhead, the rails of the second floor lined with unlit post lamps. The central staircase snaked down in two streams from the upper floors, joining in the middle and unfurling into the front hall, covered in carpet the faded red of a tongue. The walnut wainscoting gleamed, but the baseboards were scratched and scarred, and the wallpaper, printed with scenes of men hunting stags, lay tattered in places. An age-spotted mirror stood propped on a narrow hall table that also held a cut glass dish of desiccated peppermints. The walls were lined with portraits of dim figures, paintings of sprawling landscapes, lovingly rendered still lifes of animal haunches and goblets overflowing with wine. Things I remembered but didn’t recognize, as though I’d seen them in a movie, or a dream.

I felt suddenly dizzy. I wanted to sit down, but what should I sit on—the chair carved in the shape of a grinning devil? A long bench lined with a dozen briefcases with deep gouges in the leather? A pile of twine-tied packages all stamped with FRAGILE and a picture of a skull? Maybe I should just keep moving forward. There were the stairs. Somewhere, two stories up, was my childhood bedroom, and maybe if I could make it in there, shut the door, I would be transformed back into someone who belonged here. But that seemed like a long way to go on legs that were longing to carry me down—to the floor, or ideally back to town, to the train, to safety. But there was no train.

I couldn’t leave now, I told myself. Where would I even go?

The front hall was lined with portraits. I got close to them and studied them in turn, trying to see who I could remember. The largest was an oil painting of a squat, grinning young man with impressive sideburns, holding a team of white horses by their reins while they reared and foamed and rolled their eyes. My grandfather, I thought, but not the doting, laughing man I remembered—he looked fiendish. Next to him, an array of men who looked like him but with varying expressions: a skittish man in a red sweater who must have been my father. A sleek boy with a jagged smile in the same sweater as my father’s picture, but faded and frayed. And there were women here, too, all with sharp cheekbones, olive skin, dark eyes, nothing like my flat, wide-mouthed face. I scanned the whole room and could not find a single photograph of me.

I closed my eyes and steadied myself on the newel post at the base of the stairs. And then from farther back into the house, I heard a voice call out, “Eleanor! Is that you?”

I’d know that voice anywhere: it was clear and gentle, like the bell on a buoy. It cut through my fear and touched me. Mother. She used to sing to me, when I was little. And she was here.

“Where are you?” I called.

“The back garden, dear.” She sounded happy. “Come through the kitchen, it’s fastest!”

Mother. She had soft hands and she’d let me braid her long hair when I was a child. Suddenly my reservations left me, and all I wanted to do was see her again.

I quickly followed the hallway to the door that led to the kitchen. I was about to be back with my mother, and then everything would be alright. I opened the door, and as it swung open, I realized someone was standing there, waiting for me to open it.

I’d forgotten about Aunt Margaret.

She stared straight at me from under her ragged tangle of hair. She looked like the women in the portraits, but wilder: sallow skin, bags under her eyes, her clothes covered in grease stains. She frowned at me and muttered something I couldn’t make out. She didn’t like to be stared at, I remembered, and she didn’t like to be spoken to. I could work around this. I averted my eyes and held very still. Slowly, she shuffled back a few paces from the door. “Mother?” I called out again, more tentatively.

“Just follow my voice, dear!”

I edged around Margaret. In my childhood memories she was somehow lovable, always humming a tune. She muttered to herself as I skirted around her through the dark kitchen, across its brick floor and past the big stone oven blackened with years of soot, to the old farmhouse-style back door. The top half was already propped open. I slipped out through the bottom half and shut it behind me, penning Margaret in the kitchen.

My eyes had adjusted to the darkness of the house, so I was blinded at first when I stepped out into the sun. Mother gasped, then said, “My little girl!”

As my eyes adjusted, I saw the shapes in the back garden more clearly. A tall, narrow old woman in a faded black dress, a man in a suit, a woman sitting in what looked like a large iron washtub. And behind them, a table set with plates and glassware and trimmed with faded bunting. A party?

“Hullo, Eleanor,” said the man. He was older than in his portrait, but I knew he must be my father. I stepped closer, but he didn’t reach out to hug me, just looked at me curiously for a long while. Finally, I put out a hand, and he shook it dazedly.

“Eleanor,” Grandma Persephone said. I was already looking past her, looking for the voice that had called to me earlier. But when I really saw my mother, I gasped.

She was wearing a thin robe, drenched with water. Half of her face was just like mine. I recognized my high forehead, my profile. But as she turned to look at me I saw her other side: an eyeless, earless mass of red polyps that ran all the way down her body until they disappeared into the water of the tub. All of them were straining toward me, as though they could see me, as though they wanted to reach out and grasp me and suck me into the mass. I stumbled back and caught myself on the porch railing.

Her one eyebrow shot up, her half of a mouth opening in dismay. I forced myself to smile, but she reached out her good hand and took a damp towel from the edge of the tub and smoothed it protectively over the inhuman side of her face.

I knew I should go and hug her. I knew that I used to. That when I was little, I’d loved her. But now all I could think about was the feeling of those things squirming across my face.

“Hello, Mother,” I said, trying to sound breezy, like the girls at school. But they always said mummy, or mama. I couldn’t imagine what that would sound like in my mouth.

“I told them we should throw you a little party,” Mother said. “It’s been so long.”

“How did you know I was coming?”

“I saw you,” said Grandma Persephone. And when she spoke, I realized that my eye had been avoiding her in the way that it was still avoiding Mother. I forced myself to turn and take in the woman who had sent me away from home all those years ago.

Her hair was milk-white, like mine, and had been since she was young—a family trait. She towered over me, taller than a woman ought to be by her age. Hers was the original face that had spawned all the women in the portraits: her features bonier, crueler, her nose more hooked, her eyes more sunken. I swallowed hard.

“Grandmother,” I said. In my mind it sounded dignified. But it came out softer than I’d expected. Like a question.

“You made it here, I see.”

I wondered if she was angry at me. She’d told me, in letter after letter over the years, to stay put, and I hadn’t. Well, I’d better get this over with. I cleared my throat.

“I need to talk to you,” I said. “Something happened.”

Her eyebrows shot up, and she looked angry for a moment. “Not now.” She glanced out across the fields. “The others are coming. They want to say hello to you.”

As if in answer, from the woods came a long howl.

“That will be your grandfather,” she said.

But it wasn’t just him—it was three voices, mingling on the breeze. I was surprised to realize I recognized them. The long vowels of Grandpa Miklos, the sharp yips of Luma, Rhys’s guttural bark. But a part of them felt different now. I used to hear that sound and run to the door. Now I stood frozen in place like a rabbit, my eyes scanning the tree line, dreading what might come out.

“Quite alright?” Grandma Persephone asked. My throat was too dry to speak.

It was spring dusk. They were nothing more than smears of light and shadow among the trees. If they came for my throat there would be no way I could stop them. The sound of their voices made my chest ache with longing, but my legs wanted to run. A dangerous combination, to want something so badly and also be so afraid. I felt that hunger open up inside me again, the same one I’d felt gripping Lucy Spencer by the hair—

I realized I’d shut my eyes, and when I forced them open again, three shapes had broken free of the tree line, ambling along upright, laughing and joking and straightening clothing. One of the shapes, a young man tugging on a red sweater, saw me and started into a run across the lawn. He vaulted the low stone wall, rushed me, grabbed me, and heaved me high into the air. Against my will my body went limp, preparing for death.

“Ellie!”

He caught me up and held me out to look at me. My feet dangled in empty air. I still couldn’t draw breath.

“Rhys, put her down.” Grandma Persephone’s lips were pursed, but I could see the smile twitching around the edges. She thought this was funny. I couldn’t believe it.

“She likes it,” Rhys said. “Don’t you?”

“Please put me down.”

He looked wounded, but he lowered me to the ground. As soon as my feet touched down I backed away. My ribs ached where he’d held me.

“Eleanor,” Grandma Persephone said, “this is your cousin Rhys. A college man, when he bothers to show up to his classes. Popular with the ladies, or so I’ve heard.” Rhys’s chest puffed up. “And clearly, as you can see, a brute with no manners.” She said it affectionately, but I didn’t think it was funny at all.

“She knows me.” He grinned at me. “Don’t you, Ellie?”

“Of course.” I tried to infuse my voice with warmth. He felt dangerous.

“I knew it!” He moved forward as though he wanted to scoop me up again, but stopped himself short. “Every time I’m home I ask Where’s Ellie, and Grandma says—”

“She’s been at boarding school,” Grandma Persephone said.

“I know that, Grandma. Where’s she been at Christmas?”

“Rhys, who’s got the meat?” she asked.

“Grandpa.”

If my life were a book, I would start here, standing in front of the long row of check-in tables at the California Children’s Book Festival with something that feels very much like hope blooming in my chest.

And if Jenna were the editor of my book—and she totally would be, because she’d want to make sure I got it right—she would disagree. She would say I should start from when we first met, or six days ago, when we graduated from Crescent High to tearful hugs from her parents and distant pats from my mother. But just this once I’ll ignore Jenna’s advice and start here, standing in the middle of the atrium, staring upward at the huge, colorful banner suspended above the check-in.

There are at least a dozen author faces in neat, orderly rows, but it’s the center photo that makes my fingers tingle with excitement. The focal point—the largest photo of them all, and dead center—is N. E. Endsley, with his sharp cheekbones and dark, layered hair that is two steps of sophistication above boy band hair.

It’s a testament to his writing skills that his first book sold so well without the inordinately attractive author photo on the back flap.

“Author of the Orman Chronicles” is all it says beneath his unsmiling photo, but everyone knows the final book is coming. Those of us who paid a prince’s ransom—or whose best friend’s parents paid the ransom as a high school graduation gift—to be in the room for his special announcement are hoping to hear at least a release date and hopefully—squee!—a short excerpt.

I have little time to be excited beyond the sharp pain of glee that makes me feel as if the world could never be this exciting again. It’s a kind of morose happiness that I squash down because Jenna has already stridden to one of the tables and is fetching our wristbands.

“Jenna Williams,” she is saying to the blue polo behind the table when I near. “And Amelia Griffin. Both VIP passes with access to the N. E. Endsley session.”

The man flips through a stapled stack of papers before giving each of us a wristband with VIP embossed along the thin rubber. I twist mine over my hand without looking, but Jenna holds hers up for examination.

“This one has a nick in it,” she says. “May I have another?”

The man seems confused for a split second too long—all I can see behind his eyes are endless file cabinets—so before Jenna can unleash her usual speech about presentation and quality, I work the band from my wrist and quickly swap it with her nicked one before she can argue.

“It’s fine,” I say. “I don’t care.”

Jenna rolls her eyes and says, “You should,” but blessedly we walk away lecture-free and into the long rows of booths and tables stacked high with swag and books.

* * *

When the Williamses had asked us what we wanted for graduation, over dinner in late February, Jenna had barely looked up from her plate of enchiladas.

“There’s a book festival the week after graduation,” she said. “It’s only a couple of days. We could fit it in before Ireland.”

I had jerked my head toward her, surprised.

“Have you been looking at my computer again? How did you know about the festival?”

Jenna rolled her eyes. “As if you’re the only one with an internet alert out for anything related to N. E. Endsley.”

There was no doubt that she had chosen this for my benefit. Later, when she dropped me off at my house after a car ride full of my squeals about meeting N. E. Endsley, I leaned over to hug her good-bye and whispered, “You don’t like internet alerts.”

“What?” Her voice was casual.

“You don’t like internet alerts or subscription newsletters because they take up too much time and clutter your computer.”

Jenna looked out the window to hide her smile. “When did I say that?”

“You didn’t.” I grinned. “I just know. And when did you look at my computer?”

She turned to face me, indignant. “I’ve told you before you ought to lock it when you walk away from it in the library!”

“Yeah,” I deadpanned. “Wouldn’t want the riffraff seeing my search history of book festivals and—”

“And llama memes when you’re supposed to be studying?”

“Don’t judge.” I shoved her shoulder and turned it into another awkward car hug. “Besides, if I hadn’t left it open, you would have asked for something sensible for graduation. Like textbook covers or … I don’t even know what, instead of the best, best, best thing on the planet.”

“I don’t think textbook covers are a thing in college, Amelia.” Her voice was even, but I could feel her smile.

“Whatever. You know what I mean.” My nose was lodged against her hair. She smelled like shampoo and her fruity, too-sweet perfume.

“Thanks, Jenna,” I whispered, and found myself oddly choked up.

“I’ll enjoy it, too, you know,” she whispered back. “But you’re welcome. Happy graduation. Is this hug over yet?”

“Almost. Your perfume is trying to kill me.”

* * *

The same perfume brings me back to the festival, to the pulsing hustle of book lovers swarming around us, which is no match for my enthusiasm.

“Look at it,” I urge Jenna, jogging alongside her fast walk to thrust my wrist in her face. “Look! This band means that, in only three hours, we get to see N. E. Endsley. Endsley, Jenna.”

Jenna does not pause, unfazed by my attempts at distraction.

“Amelia.” She says my name with a mix of exasperation and affection, but more of the latter than usual. “There are other events before his session, and we should enjoy some other panels and booths, too, okay?”

“Whatever you say, JenJen.” I say the pet name her first and last boyfriend gave her under my breath, thinking she won’t hear it in the din.

“Do not call me that.”

Her dark, curly strands bounce toward me all at once, and her eyes narrow, but a corner of her lips is restraining a smile.

“Oh, come on, JenJen. Lighten up. It’s a perfectly good name for a girlfriend … or a poodle.”

“Shove off,” she says, laughing. She steers us into a booth of T-shirts in all the colors of the rainbow with catchy book phrases printed on their fronts: I READ PAST MY BEDTIME or I’M A BOOK DRAGON, NOT A BOOKWORM. Most can also be purchased as posters, and I push us toward the rolled-up plastic tubes near the back of the booth.

“This is why boyfriends are useless,” Jenna mutters. “They distract you from schoolwork and they make up stupid names that your so-called friends never let you live down.”

“Chin up, JenJen,” I say, extracting one of the poster tubes from its brethren. “What do you think of this one for our dorm room?”

The top of the poster is decorated with little cartoon people attempting and failing to ski, skateboard, and surf, the message below reading, “If at first you don’t succeed, read a book instead.”

“That hardly seems conducive to an encouraging study environment,” Jenna says. “Besides, I don’t appreciate the implication that one cannot be a reader and an athlete.”

“Killjoy.” I thwap her on the shoulder with the tube.

“Child.” She grabs the poster from me and hits me lightly atop my head, before heading to the register and sliding her father’s credit card across the counter.

“You didn’t have to buy it,” I say afterward.

She shrugs. “Dad said, and I quote, ‘It’s your graduation present. Go crazy. But don’t tell your mother.’”

“Your poor mom,” I say. “She’s going to want to throttle you when the credit card bill comes in. Meanwhile, you’ll be far away in Ireland, collecting plants and being nerdy.”

“Specimens,” Jenna corrects.

“Whatever.” I sidestep a woman in a long skirt pushing a dolly full of boxes like it’s a race car. “She’ll want to give you one of your own lectures and you won’t be there to hear it.”

“I’ll just blame it on you and she can give you an earful.”

We move into a slim, unoccupied space between booths so Jenna can pull up the festival schedule on her phone.

It suddenly strikes me as very adult, our solitary trip to California. Jenna and I are in charge of the events we attend, where we eat lunch, what swag we buy. I keep waiting for somebody to accuse us of being unaccompanied minors, to escort us from the premises and call our parents, but we’re eighteen. We’re enrolled in Missoula for the fall. We are adults. Sort of.

I am vitalized and cowed by this realization, and I want to remember this moment of watching my friend lead the way on our first long-distance solo trip. While Jenna scrolls, I wrestle my trusty digital camera from my backpack and remove the lens cover. I look through the viewfinder and snap one picture—it’s my rule—and then let the camera hang from its strap around my neck.

“If we book it, we could make it to ballroom C for the ‘It’s Only a Flesh Wound: Violence in Fantasy’ panel,” I say, grinning. “Get it? Book it?”

My laugh echoes in the small space, but Jenna only snorts and keeps scrolling. I practically have the schedule memorized, after a week of alternating between staring at the welcome email and obsessively rereading the two Orman books.

My mind wanders ahead to what his session will be like, my head spinning with everything I know about Orman and Endsley.

While the first book—The Forest Between the Sea and the Sky—is about finding Orman and the power struggle set up between Ainsley and Emmeline, the second book—The In-Between Queens—is about Emmeline and Ainsley gathering their armies to fight each other for the throne. But because the Old Laws only let them stay in Orman for spurts of time, for parts of the book they are dealing with each other and their parents back in our world. They’re rulers of their realms in Orman, but here in our world they still have to do homework and clean up Oreo crumbs they drop on the carpet. It’s funny to watch them try to exist in such different environments.

Everyone thinks the third book is going to be set completely in Orman, but I hope not. I like to imagine the girls somewhere in this world with me—Emmeline running out of toilet paper after she pees and dealing with real stuff alongside me, but slipping back into Orman to take her place as the true queen of the kingdom.

They’re the kind of stories that keep you up late at night, ones I sink into so fully I’m certain they are secret histories of a real world that I just haven’t figured out how to get to. Reading them makes me feel as if I’m putting on a suit of armor over a beloved sweater, fierce and comfortable, nostalgic and adventurous.

And N. E. Endsley is some sort of absurdly young writing prodigy. He’s only a year older than Jenna and me. Social media lit up a few weeks ago on his nineteenth birthday, and a few prominent sites ran articles recapping his improbably glorious success.

He started writing the stories when he was only thirteen and published the first book when he was sixteen, the second book’s publication following a year later. The third and final book of the trilogy was supposed to come out this year, but the release date was pushed back indefinitely.

No one knows why.

There are rumors, though. Some say that he has writer’s block and can’t figure out how to end such an epic story when it’s become so popular. Some go further and accuse the fandom of being the root of the problem, using words like vapid and invasive. Expecting too much, putting too much pressure on Endsley’s creative space.

Others still say he’ll never finish, that he’s become a social recluse before the age of twenty-five and that whatever has caused it, the story will end with the second book.

I hope it’s not true, but I don’t have much to hope on. Nobody does. Endsley rarely grants interviews. What the Orman fandom knows of him comes mostly in trickles and hearsay.

One night I couldn’t sleep and I fell down an internet rabbit hole, reading comments from people who’ve run into Endsley in New York City, where he lives. One girl saw him at the public library and approached to ask for an autograph of the second book, which she happened to have with her. Endsley refused. But as he walked away, a different boy approached her. He apologized for Endsley’s behavior and asked for the girl’s address, promising to send her a signed copy, before apologizing again for Endsley’s rudeness and disappearing into the crowd.

In an updated post, the girl claimed to have received the book.

Who knows if it’s true. Maybe I’ll be better able to judge for myself when I see him face-to-face.

“What about the ‘Just Enough Cooks in the Kitchen’ panel?” Jenna asks, interrupting my daydreaming. “June Turner and some of the authors from that anthology about feminism in high school are speaking. You know, the book I gave you to read last week that you never did?”

“How do you know I didn’t read it?” I ask.

“Because you gave it back to me without a page out of place, that’s how. There wasn’t so much as a smudge on it.”

“Are you suggesting I’m a book destroyer?”

Jenna gives me the same look I’ve seen Mrs. Williams level at Mr. Williams on weekly grocery runs, when he sneaks extra boxes of prepackaged muffins into the shopping cart, which he claims are “for his girls.” It’s a look of exasperation, but full of so much love it makes my insides burst.

I laugh. “Fine, I’m not a neat freak. Sue me. And you’re right about me not reading it, but only because I was—”

“Rereading the Endsley books,” Jenna interrupts. “I know.”

I link my arm through hers, dragging her once more into the river of people.

“Feminism panel it is, JenJen. We better get moving if we want seats up front. I know that’s where you’ll want to sit.”

Jenna is obviously resisting the urge to roll her eyes at me again as I stubbornly keep my arm linked through hers. It’s difficult to walk side by side with so many people around us. She doesn’t drop her arm, though. It’s her job to make the big and not-so-big choices in this friendship. It’s my job to make whatever she chooses fun, no matter how many faces she makes.

Both of us have an easy task today, because though she won’t say it aloud, I know that Jenna’s heart is beating just as eagerly as mine, marking time until we are closer to Orman and its creator than we’ve ever been before.

Click here for the excerpt to The Shadow Box

Late in the afternoon, Seyed sat on a lab stool next to me and eased my pencil out of my hand. “Hey, Evelyn?” He ducked his head and looked at me with his wide, patient brown eyes.

“Yeah?”

“You’re driving me fucking crazy.” He drummed the pencil on the side of my clipboard in a staccato rhythm. It was loud, uneven, and deeply irritating. He twisted in his chair, looked at the lab phone, looked back at the clipboard, tapped it with the pencil again. “You’ve been doing this shit all day,” he said. “Call Martine already.”

A flush of shame. Fidgeting. “You’re right. I don’t know why I’ve been—ugh. I’ll do it soon, okay?” I almost apologized, but I stopped myself just in time. It was one of my rules, a rule that my father branded into me when I was a child. It was a rule that had gotten me through grad school and internships and the endless fight for respect and recognition. Never apologize in the lab. Never apologize in the workplace.

Never apologize.

“C’mon, boss.” Seyed gave me an encouraging smile. It stung like cautery. “You’re Evelyn Goddamn Caldwell. You just won a Neufmann Honor. This lady’s got nothing on you.”

I grimaced, but nodded. Seyed calling me “boss,” the sign of a serious pep-talk attempt.

He was doing his best.

He couldn’t help what he didn’t know.

I’ve never been an optimist.

I’ve never had cause to expect a positive outcome when all the signs point to a negative one.

Except once.

I bowed to optimism one time, and it was a mistake.

I had been at the museum, enduring an ill-advised attempt at connecting with Lorna’s other research assistant. He was a man who rode his bicycle to the lab every day and ate raw vegetables for lunch. He was tall, stringy, an array of tendons loosely hung on a wire framework. He seemed like a good way for me to practice networking, if not actual friendship. I can’t even remember his name now—Chris, probably, or Ben.

Nathan had found me while I was waiting for my colleague to return from an eternal trip to the lavatory. He sidled up to me at a display of collider schematics. He had long hair then, past his shirt collar, and wore it tied back into a low ponytail. I remember noticing the ponytail and rolling my eyes before he even spoke to me. Later, just before our wedding, he cut it off, and I cried myself to sleep missing it.

“You don’t look like you’re having fun on your date.” That was the first thing he said, his voice pitched low enough that I didn’t immediately recognize that he was talking to me. When I glanced over, Nathan was looking at me sidelong, his mouth crooked up into a dimpled half-smile.

“It’s not a date,” I snapped. “We just work together.”

“He seems to think that it’s a date,” he’d said. “Poor guy’s under the impression that you think it’s a date too. He keeps trying to grab your hand.” I looked at him with alarm, and he held up his hands, took a step away from me. “I haven’t been watching you or following you or anything, we’ve just—we’ve been in the same exhibits a couple of times, and I noticed. Sorry.”

He started to walk away, hands in his pockets, but I stopped him. “It’s not a date,” I said, not bothering to keep my voice down. “He knows it’s not a date. We’re just colleagues.” My non-date came out of the bathroom then, looked around, spotted me. He started to cross the gallery, and I panicked. “In fact,” I said, “you should give me your phone number. Right now.” He grinned and took my phone, sent himself a message from it. Hi, it’s Nathan, rescuing you from an awkward situation.

By the time he’d finished, my colleague had reached us. I gave Nathan a wink, trying to come across as flirtatious, as bold. He would later tell me that I’d looked panicked.

“Give me a call,” he’d said, glancing between me and poor Chris, or Ben, or whatever his name was.

I’d gotten what I needed—a way to make sure my colleague knew that the thing he had hoped for was never going to happen. I told him brightly about getting asked out, said something about how we should do coworker outings more often. I pretended not to notice the way his face fell.

I never had any intention of calling Nathan.

But I did call him. I didn’t have a good reason to, didn’t have any data to support the decision. I took a chance on him.

I had hoped for the best.

––––

Martine answered the phone on the second ring. Her voice was high, light, warm. Nonthreatening. Hearing it was like swallowing a cheekful of venom.

“Hello, this is the Caldwell residence, Martine speaking.”

I forced myself to look past the fact that she’d used Nathan’s last name, as if it belonged to her. As if she were a Caldwell. As if she got to have a name at all. I unconsciously slipped into the low, brusque tone I used when speaking at conferences. “It’s Evelyn. My lab assistant gave me your message.” I didn’t ask any questions, didn’t let any uncertainty through. Authoritative. Unapologetic. Don’t fidget. Don’t apologize.

She was more than polite. Excited, even. She sounded like she was talking to an old friend, instead of to the woman whose husband she’d stolen. That’s not fair, I mentally chastised myself. It’s not her fault. I told her that I couldn’t talk long, tried to sound like there was a reason I had to go, instead of like I was running away.

“Oh, before I forget—I understand congratulations are in order,” Martine said, her voice easy. I couldn’t help admiring the way she navigated conversation, the infinite finesse of it. She was showing me mercy: by interrupting, she kept me from having to commit the rudeness of admitting I didn’t want to stay on the phone. The faux pas of her interruption rescued me from feeling awkward. It absorbed discomfort on my behalf. The ultimate mannerly posture.

I recognized the maneuver. It was directly out of my mother’s playbook.

Martine asked me if I would consider getting a cup of tea with her. I paused long enough that she asked if I was still on the line. “Yes. I’m here.” I cleared my throat. “Why do you want to get tea with me, Martine?”

Martine laughed, a light, tinkling laugh, one designed to make people feel fun at parties. That was also my mother’s. “Oh, I’m so sorry if I’ve worried you at all, Evelyn. I just wanted to get tea so we could get to know each other a little. I know that things with Nathan aren’t ideal, but I don’t want there to be any troubled water between us. Don’t you think it would be better if we could be friends?”

I choked back a laugh. “Friends?”

“I would love to get to know you,” Martine said, as though this were a perfectly reasonable request. I was the woman who had been married to Nathan, the woman whose life Martine’s existence had blown to pieces, and she wanted to get to know me. Of course she did. Why wouldn’t she?

She asked again, and this time, a note of pleading entered her voice. “Just tea. An hour. That’s all. Please?”

I didn’t ask for his opinion, but of course Seyed told me not to do it.

“I have to. I said I would.”

“Don’t get coffee with this lady, it’s weird. You know this is weird, right?”

You have no idea how weird this is, I thought. “She asked me to get tea, not coffee. And I have to go.”

Seyed looked up from the felt he was gluing to a clipboard. “Why do you owe her anything? It’s not like you’re the homewrecker here.”

“She’s—it’s complicated, Sy. And besides, I already said I’d go.”

“When are you doing this objectively insane thing?”

“Tomorrow morning. So I’ll need you to handle the fluid sampling.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You mean I’m covering your workload while you do the thing you know you shouldn’t do.”

“Yes,” I said. “Please.”

“Great.” He walked the clipboard back to the tank it belonged to, returned it, and grabbed an un-felted clipboard from the next tank over. “Perfect. Because I didn’t have enough to do.”

He was irritated with me, and rightly so. I debated telling him everything—telling him why I couldn’t say no to Martine, what I owed to her, why I needed to see her. But it was too much already, him knowing who Martine was. Him knowing Nathan had been unfaithful.

The idea of telling Seyed who Martine really was caused my entire mind to recoil. “I’ll be in by ten,” I said.

“Have you ever seen this woman in person before?” he asked. “What if she’s, like, a murderer?”

I grimaced at the memory of my knuckles on the red-painted front door of Nathan’s second, secret house. The knob turning. Martine’s face, smiling out at me, eyes blank and polite in the few seconds before recognition struck us both. “I’ve seen her before,” I said. “She’s very sane.”

Seyed shook his head, cutting a strip of felt. “I still don’t think you should do this to yourself,” he said softly. “Not that my opinion matters.”

That last part wasn’t a barb—it was an apology. He knew he was intruding, knew he was speaking out of turn. And he also knew that his opinion did matter, mattered when no one else’s did. He was allowed to question me. He was allowed to offer opinions. He was allowed to speak during oversight meetings, even when my funding was at risk, even when the meeting was really a battle for survival.

I respected Seyed. He could keep up with me. He was one of the only people who was allowed to have an opinion at all.

“I know I shouldn’t do it, Sy,” I replied, watching him apply glue to the back of the clipboard. “But I’m going to anyway.”

I couldn’t turn my back on Martine.

I couldn’t escape her, any more than I could escape myself.

Kieran hoped the numbness would set in soon. The ocean’s icy burn usually mellowed into something more neutral, but as the minutes ticked by he still felt cold. He braced himself as a fresh wave broke against his skin.

The water wasn’t even too bad, he told himself. Not at the tail end of summer with the afternoon sun doing its best to take the edge off. Definitely goose bumps rather than hypothermia. Kieran knew he had personally described water far colder than this as “nice.” Only ever here in Tasmania, though, where sea temperatures surrounding the small island state were relative.

Sydney—the voice in Kieran’s head sounded suspiciously like his brother’s—has made you soft.

Maybe. But the real problem was that instead of slicing out through the blue with breath expanding in his chest and the water roaring past his ears and nothing but hundreds of kilometers of rolling sea separating him from the next-nearest landmass, he was standing perfectly still, waist-deep, three meters from the beach.

His daughter lay milk-drunk against his bare chest, cocooned in a dry towel, a tiny sun hat shielding her eyes as she dozed. At three months old, Audrey was growing heavy now. He shifted her weight and, ignoring the mild ache in his shoulders and the cold against his legs, looked out at the horizon and let her sleep on.

Audrey was not the only one out for the count. On the beach, Kieran could see his girlfriend lying flat on her back, fully clothed, one arm flung over her eyes and her mouth slack. Mia’s head was resting on a rolled-up towel with her hair splayed out in a long, dark fan against the sand. She could sleep anywhere these days, as could he.

There was almost no one else around. A teenage couple he hadn’t recognized had wandered by earlier, hand in hand and barefoot, and further along the sand a young woman had been beachcombing at the shoreline since they’d arrived. At the height of summer holidaymakers outnumbered Evelyn Bay’s nine-hundred-strong population by two to one, but now they had mostly left, their real lives calling them back to the mainland and beyond.

“Hey!”

A familiar voice made Kieran turn. The man was emerging from one of the small side paths that connected a row of weathered beach houses to the sand. He was grinning as he hoisted a battered backpack higher on his shoulder. At his feet loped a large dog of undetermined breed, whose size and shaggy gold-brown hair made him look disconcertingly similar to his owner.

Kieran waded out of the water and met Ash McDonald on the sand, turning so Ash could see the baby on his chest.

“Bloody hell.” Ash used a callused finger to pull back a corner of the towel and leaned his unshaven face in to look at Audrey.

“Well, she’s too pretty to be yours, mate, but congratulations all the same.” He straightened and winked at Mia, who had roused herself now, brushing the sand from her skirt as she walked over to join them. “Just kidding. She’s beautiful.”

“Thanks, Ash.” Mia smothered a yawn as he kissed her cheek, and reached down to pat his dog. “Hello, Shifty.”

Ash nodded at Kieran’s wet shorts. “How’s the water?”

“Nice enough.”

“Reliving the good old days, eh?”

Kieran smiled. “Rather be swimming.”

Kieran couldn’t count how many hours he and Ash had spent as teenagers standing up to their waists in the ocean for recovery the day after a football game, waiting for the frigid water to work its alleged magic. A lot.

Ash had been a summer face floating around Evelyn Bay on and off for years, but at fifteen he’d become a full-time fixture when his parents’ divorce propelled his mother back to her hometown.

Kieran hadn’t known too much about him, other than he was from a mining town in the west of the state so hardened that their local football team played on gravel, not grass. Given that, Kieran probably shouldn’t have been as surprised as he was when the new guy showed up at training and, for the first time in his life, Kieran wasn’t automatically winning the speed drills, his goal accuracy ranking was at risk, and on-field maneuvers that had gone unchallenged for years were now aggressively contested. He had wasted a few weeks feeling pissed off, then hit the gym and the oval even harder, only to feel pissed off again when he ran into Ash doing exactly the same.

It had been midway through the season when Kieran had arrived late to the beach and waded out only to find himself accidentally standing next to Ash. Not willing to be the one to move, Kieran had crossed his arms and stared hard at the sea. They’d stood side by side in silence for the whole session. Somewhere invisible to the north lay mainland Australia, to the far south, Antarctica. In front of them, nothing, all the way to the horizon.

“Set more personal bests this month than I did the whole of last year at my old club.”

Ash’s voice had caught Kieran by surprise. He had glanced over at the other boy, who was sometimes a shade stronger or a second faster or a beat quicker to react, and sometimes wasn’t. Ash didn’t take his eyes off the water as he spoke again.

“Been good, actually.”

And bloody hell, Kieran had realized with a mix of annoyance and dawning appreciation, the bloke was right. It hadbeen good. Kieran had never been better than when he was racing around after this dickhead. The coach had called time and Kieran had watched as Ash started to wade back to the beach. He had opened his mouth.

“Hey, wait a sec.”

Ash had. And from then on, that was pretty much it.

Neither played footy too often anymore, but nearly a decade and a half down the line, Kieran was at least as fit as he had been then, and his job as a sports physiotherapist meant it was now his turn to encourage people to stand in freezing salt water. Ash seemed about the same too, Kieran thought. His landscaping business had given him the look of gnarled good health that came from throwing around bags of soil and wrestling downed trees.

“When’d you get back?” Ash set his backpack down on the sand, and Kieran heard the dull metal clang of gardening tools inside.

“Couple of hours ago.”

Kieran and Mia had stayed only as long as was polite in his parents’ house before making an excuse to get out for some fresh air. He could still see their back veranda from where he stood, only a white wooden fence separating their property from the beach. Kieran thought about having to head back inside and felt faintly claustrophobic.

“How’s your dad doing?” Ash said. “Haven’t run into him for a couple of weeks.”

“Not great.” Kieran wondered if he would have to explain, but no, of course Ash was already nodding. In a place like Evelyn Bay, people knew each other’s business. Probably better than Kieran did himself. He hadn’t seen his dad in person for more than eighteen months, when Brian had last been well enough to fly up to Sydney. Even then, Brian had been persistently confused, and Kieran’s mum, Verity, had spent most of the visit patiently explaining things to him. When Audrey had been born three months ago, Verity had come alone to meet her first grandchild.

Despite this flashing-red warning, Kieran had still been shocked silent when they’d arrived earlier that day to be greeted by the void that had once been Brian Elliott. Kieran was genuinely unsure if his dad had deteriorated rapidly or if he himself had been in complete denial. Either way, at just sixty-six, the dementia had a throttlehold on him now. Even the doctors reckoned Brian had been dealt an unlucky hand.

“When’s the move?” Ash glanced at Kieran’s parents’ place.

“Few weeks.” The nursing home in Hobart was ready and waiting. “We thought Mum could do with a hand to clear stuff out.”

“And what’s she going to do? She’s not going in as well, is she?”

“No.” Kieran pictured Verity, who at sixty-four could easily pass for ten years younger and still ran or biked most days. “She’s found a one-bedroom place near the nursing home.”

“Right. That’ll be”—Ash ran his tongue over his teeth as he searched for a word—“convenient.”

“Yeah.” Kieran really hoped so, because he strongly suspected Verity was going to absolutely hate it.

Ash thought for a moment. “Listen, tell Verity to let me know before the house hits the market. I’ll tidy up the garden for her. For free, obviously.”

“Really? Thanks, mate.”

“No worries. It’s a shit situation.”

It was shit. Kieran had known that. He should have come home earlier.

“How long since you were last back?” Ash said, reading his mind.

“Two years?”

“Longer than that, I reckon,” Ash said, even as Mia was shaking her head.

“It’s been nearly three,” she said, turning to Ash. “How’s Olivia? I emailed her to say we’d be here for the week.”

“Yeah, she’s good, she definitely wants to catch up.” Ash was reaching for his phone. “Let me check if she’s around now actually; that’s her place just up there. Fisherman’s Cottage.” He nodded along the row of beach houses backing onto the sand.

“Oh yeah?” Kieran could picture the low-slung weatherboard bungalow a dozen doors up from his parents’ place. Cottage was a generously poetic name. Like pretty much every other house in the town—even a lot of the newer ones—it screamed 1960s architecture. “How long’s she been renting there?”

“Eighteen months or so. Since she moved back, anyway.”

As Ash dialed his girlfriend, Kieran tried to picture what Olivia Birch would look like at thirty. He hadn’t seen her properly in—he tried to work it out—years, anyway, so the image in his head was firmly set at eighteen. She’d had a kind of lithe height and poise that adults described as “statuesque” and boys described as “hot.” She had been a regular down at the shore, her brown curly hair tied high in a ponytail, which she pushed aside impatiently as she zipped up her wetsuit. She would still be tall, obviously, and probably still beautiful. Girls born with Olivia’s looks tended to keep them.

Ash held the phone to his ear, then hung up, frowning a little at the screen. He lifted his head and, to Kieran’s surprise, shouted out along the beach.

“Hey! Bronte!”

The young woman had stopped beachcombing and was now crouching at the edge of the surf, focusing a camera on something in the sand. She looked up at Ash’s call, then stood, her skirt flapping in the sea breeze.

“Liv’s housemate,” Ash said to Kieran and Mia before pointing toward the cottage and raising his voice again. “Olivia at home?”

The girl—Bronte, Kieran gathered—shook her head, an exaggerated gesture over the distance. No. They saw rather than heard the word, her voice snatched away by the wind.

Ash cupped a hand around his mouth. “Where is she?”

A shrug. Don’t know.

“Right, well.” Ash turned back to his phone, the frown deepening. “I dunno. But look, she’s working tonight so let’s all go for drinks. She can say hello there.”

“Liv’s still working at the Surf and Turf?” Mia tried and failed to hide her surprise.

“Yeah,” Ash said. “For now, anyway. So, what time tonight? Eightish?”

“I’m not sure, mate.” Kieran pointed at Audrey in the towel, awake now underneath her sun hat. “We’ve got the bub, so—”

“So that’s what grandmothers are for, isn’t it?” Ash was already texting. “I’ll let Liv know we’ll be in. Get Sean along as well.”

Kieran and Mia exchanged a look through which they conducted an entire silent conversation, culminating in a barely visible nod from each. They would both go.

“Okay.” Texting complete, Ash picked up his backpack and slung it over his shoulder. “I’d better get back to work. I’ll see you later.” He leaned in to Audrey. “But not you, little one. You get to spend some quality time with Grandma.”

Audrey turned her head to look at him and the wind caught the edge of her hat, ripping it off. Both Kieran and Ash lunged for it, but it was halfway down the beach before they’d moved. Ash cupped his mouth again.

“Bronte!”

The girl was now knee-deep in the water, examining a length of seaweed she held in both hands. Her canvas bag lay safely up on the sand. She raised her head at his call, the movement both impatient and indulgent.

What now?

She saw Audrey’s little hat skimming along the edge of the surf and dropped the seaweed. She ran after the hat, gathering her skirt above her knees with one hand as she splashed through the water, the white crests of the waves fizzing around her legs. She nearly had it when the breeze spirited it up and away, out to sea and out of reach.

Kieran watched as Bronte stopped, recognizing a lost cause when she saw one. She dropped her skirt, the hem falling just clear of the water, and ran a hand distractedly over the back of her neck, lifting her sheet of blond hair away from her skin in a thick, messy handful. She watched the hat float away.

“What are you waiting for?” Ash was grinning. “Swim out!”

She laughed and called back something that sounded like: You swim out.

“Don’t be so bloody selfish, Bronte. You’re already half in.”

She let her hair fall loose again and with her free hand flashed him the finger.

Ash laughed and turned away as his phone buzzed once in his hand. He glanced down but didn’t say anything.

Kieran looked out at the hat, which was doing an unnerving impression of a person as it bobbed in the surf.

“Oh well.” Mia reached out and took Audrey. “I think it’s gone, sweetheart. Sorry.”

Audrey, unconcerned, simply lifted a chubby hand and grabbed at her mother’s necklace. She yanked the silver chain in her fist as they all stood on the beach and watched as the hat dipped once, then twice, before being swallowed by the sea.

You don’t know me, but you’ll have seen my face. In the earlier pictures, they bludgeoned our features with pixels, right down to our waists; even our hair was too distinctive to disclose. But the story and its protectors grew weary, and in the danker corners of the Internet we became easy to find. The favored photograph was taken in front of the house on Moor Woods Road, early on a September evening. We had filed out and lined up, six of us in height order and Noah in Ethan’s arms, while Father arranged the composition. Little white wraiths squirming in the sunshine. Behind us, the house rested in the last of the day’s light, shadows spreading from the windows and the door. We were still and looking at the camera. It should have been perfect. But just before Father pressed the button, Evie squeezed my hand and turned up her face toward me; in the photograph, she is just about to speak, and my smile is starting to curl. I don’t remember what she said, but I’m quite sure that we paid for it, later.

I arrived at the prison in the midafternoon. On the drive I had been listening to an old playlist made by JP, Have a Great Day, and without the music and the engine, the car was abruptly quiet. I opened the door. Traffic was building on the motorway, the noise of it like the ocean.

The prison had released a short statement confirming Mother’s death. I read the articles online the evening before, which were perfunctory, and which all concluded with a variation of the same happy ending: the Gracie children, some of whom have waived their anonymity, are believed to be well. I sat in a towel on the hotel bed with room service on my lap, laughing. At breakfast, there was a stack of local newspapers next to the coffee; Mother was on the front page, underneath an article about a stabbing at Wimpy Burger. A quiet day.

My room included a hot buffet, and I kept eating right up until the end, when the waitress told me that the kitchen had to begin preparing for lunch.

“People stop for lunch?” I asked.

“You’d be surprised,” she said. She looked apologetic. “Lunch isn’t included with the room, though.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “Thanks. That was really good.”

When I started my job, my mentor, Julia Devlin, told me that the time would come when I would tire of free food and free alcohol; when my fascination with platters of immaculate canapŽs would wane; when I would no longer set my alarm to get to a hotel breakfast. Devlin was right about a lot of things, but not about that.

I had never been to the prison before, but it wasn’t so different from what I had imagined. Beyond the car park were white walls, crowned with barbed wire, like a challenge from a fairy tale. Behind that, four towers presided over a concrete moat, with a gray fort at its center. Mother’s little life. I had parked too far away and had to walk across a sea of empty spaces, following the thick white lines where I could. There was only one other car in the lot, and inside it there was an old woman, clutching the wheel. When she saw me, she raised her hand, as if we might know each other, and I waved back.

Underfoot, the tarmac was starting to stick. By the time I reached the entrance, I could feel sweat in my bra and in the hair at the back of my neck. My summer clothes were in a wardrobe in New York. I had remembered English summers as timid, and every time I stepped outside, I was surprised by bold blue sky. I had spent some time that morning thinking about what to wear, stuck, half-dressed, in the wardrobe mirror; there really wasn’t an outfit for every occasion, after all. I had settled on a white shirt, loose jeans, shop-clean trainers, obnoxious sunglasses. Is it too jovial? I asked Olivia, texting her a picture, but she was in Italy, at a wedding on the walls of Volterra, and she didn’t reply.

There was a receptionist, just like in any other office. “Do you have an appointment” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “With the warden.”

“With the director?”

“Sure. With the director.”

“Are you Alexandra?”

“That’s me.”

The warden had agreed to meet me in the entrance hall. “There’s a reduced staff on Saturday afternoons,” she had said. “And no visitors after three p.m. It should be quiet for you.”

“I’d like that,” I said. “Thanks.”

“I shouldn’t say this,” she said, “but it would be the time for the great escape.”

Now she came down the corridor, filling it. I had read about her online. She was the country’s first female warden of a high-security facility, and she had given a few interviews after her appointment. She had wanted to be a police officer at a time when height restrictions were still in force, and she was two inches under. She had discovered that she was still tall enough to be a prison officer, which was illogical, but okay with her. She wore an electric blue suit-I recognized it from the pictures accompanying the interviews-and strange, dainty shoes, as if somebody had told her they might soften her impression. She believed-absolutely-in the power of rehabilitation. She looked more tired than in her photographs.

“Alexandra,” she said, and shook my hand. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“I’m not,” I said. “So don’t worry about it.”

She gestured back from where she had come. “I’m just by the visitors’ center,” she said. “Please.”

The corridor was a tepid yellow, scuffed at the baseboards and decorated with shriveled posters about pregnancy and meditation. At the end there was a scanner, as well as a conveyor belt for your belongings. Steel lockers to the ceiling. “Formalities,” she said. “At least it’s not busy.”

“Like an airport,” I said. I thought of the service in New York, two days before: my laptop and phones in a gray tray and the neat, transparent bag of makeup that I set beside them. There were special lanes for frequent flyers, and I never had to queue.

Twenty-three years as the handmaiden of a daaeman had prepared Claire for many things, but not this. Nothing could have prepared her for this.

She huddled back against a brick wall, the cold seeping through her thin dress, and watched the inky shadows grow on the building opposite her. Discarded paper disturbed by the wind rustled over the pavement and a sudden bloom of voices and laughter came from the mouth of the alley and gradually faded away.

Still the shadows grew.

Claire glanced at the street beyond the pocket of shadows in which she’d secreted herself, where pale yellow light from street lamps pooled on the sidewalk. She didn’t think she could make it. She didn’t think she could outrun them.

There were few people in the world—any of the worlds—who could outrun a determined daaeman, especially an Atrika.

The alien earth sighed and shuddered far beyond the concrete beneath her feet, reacting to her dulled and confused magick. This place, this Earth, was nothing like she remembered. The place she barely recalled was green, soft, and redolent with fragrant, growing things. This place was hard and chilly. Too loud. It hurt her eyes with sharp edges and bright lights.

Part of her had longed to return to this place, even while most of her had feared it. Claire knew now she’d been right to fear.

Pass me by. Please, pass by.

The odd dry tang of Rue’s magick still flavored the back of her mouth. The hot rush of it had faded to something bitter. It tingled through her body, giving her the shakes from time to time as her body struggled to contain this thing that was so much bigger than her. She wasn’t meant to hold this power. She wasn’t made for it. It wasn’t hers. The elium, the most powerful weapon of the Ytrayi. Or at least, that’s what she suspected it was. Whatever it was, the Atrika wanted it and that could only mean her death.

The only question was whether it would come slow or fast.

She squeezed her eyes shut, remembering. It had only happened yesterday, but it seemed like years had passed. When the Atrika had breached the palace defenses, Rue had taken her to the portal room with the intention of destroying the interdimensional doorway that bridged Earth and Eudae.

But when the Atrika had broken into the chamber, Rue had blasted her with a ball of magick so strong it had momentarily taken her sense of sight, smell, and hearing. As he’d meant it to, the blast had catapulted her backward, into the doorway. Rue had meant to destroy the portal after she’d fallen through, and undoubtedly he had, but not before two Atrika had lunged in after her.

On the Earth side of the portal, she’d taken one single moment to orient herself and then had lurched forward into a run for her life, knowing the Atrika would be fast behind her. Even though her stomach had been heaving with the aftermath of her fall through the doorway, even though her head had been ready to split like a too ripe melon, she’d run.

But not fast enough. Not far enough. And she certainly hadn’t hidden well enough.

Last night she’d climbed a set of metal stairs and curled up on the top of a building to sleep with the sounds of a city she almost remembered, but not quite, below her. In the morning, forced to find food, she’d climbed down and had done her level best to avoid the two Atrika she’d known were hunting her.

In all her years on Eudae she’d never even seen an Atrika up close. Rue, the Cae, leader of the Ytrayi daaeman breed, had treated her as a pampered pet. He’d protected her from anything that might hurt her . . . until now. With Rue, she’d wanted for nothing, never gone without food. This, all of this, was utterly foreign to her.

She needed to find Thomas Monahan and the aeamon, half-breed daaeman/humans, who resided on this planet. They called themselves elemental witches here. They were the only ones who would understand what had happened. They were the only ones who could help her now.

Claire knew little of them, didn’t know where to find them, or how they functioned in this world. She couldn’t even use her magick, not with Rue’s gift fluttering inside her. She had no idea how her power would react. If it was elium Rue had imbued her with, accidentally tapping it could mean utter destruction. The inability to use her power was perhaps the worst thing about her current condition.

Worse than the cold. Worse than the hunger or the fatigue or the fear.

In every way imaginable, she was hobbled.

Claire had never been so cold. In all the demonic winters she’d spent on Eudae, where the temperatures ranged into the bone-shattering range for an aeamon, she’d never been this miserable. The wound she’d sustained on her foot the first day as she’d run from the Atrikahadn’t so much healed up as it had frozen up. Hunger constantly distracted her and made her weak. By now she was so bedraggled, people on the street gave her a wide berth and pitying glances.

Never had she been so humiliated.

Today she’d walked down streets, not knowing where she was headed. She’d only known she had to keep moving since the Atrika might be able to track her magickally.

People had pressed paper and coins, which she recognized as money, into her palm once in a while. However, when she’d inquired where she could find the elemental witches, they’d only given her strange looks and hurried away. Inquiries as to how to protect herself against demons—the human’s pronunciation of daaeman—had met with a similar response, so Claire had stopped asking. These random acts of generosity were few and far between, but they’d already helped her buy a little food, a transaction she’d stumbled through badly. And the resulting piece of meat wrapped in soggy bread had been horrid.

She’d managed to evade the Atrika for a while, but then she’d turned a corner and there they’d been. Claire had whirled and tried to go in the other direction before they spotted her, but it had been too late. So she’d run to this alley and endeavored to hide.

Now they were searching for her. She could smell them. Daaeman magick had a peculiar sharp scent and these Atrika weren’t masking their true nature at the moment. Likely they were trying to spook her.

It was working.

Claire opened her eyes just for a moment and glanced up into the dark sky with its odd absence of stars. Nothing but concrete here. Concrete and square shapes. Black, cold sky. On Eudae, in the capital city of Ai, the buildings were made of lavender and rose marble, sometimes black or gray. They all shone and glittered under the sun. Structures built in columns, gentle slopes, and arches. The palace, called Yrystrayi, was majestic in its architecture.

Daaeman were brutal regardless of breed. Even the Syari, the scholar class, were more prone to killing before asking questions. The warrior class, the Atrika, were the worst. Unlike the rest of the breeds, they dined on rotting flesh, loved to drink blood, and became aroused by torture and pain.

But all the breeds, even the Atrika, had beautiful architecture.

Her mother told her she’d been born here on Earth, and Claire did have some hazy, early childhood memories of this place, but mostly she felt like she’d slipped down a rabbit hole. Her mother, before she’d died, had told the story of Alice in Wonderland often to Claire. Maybe her mother had felt like Alice when she’d first come to Eudae as much as Claire did now on Earth.

Footsteps crushed refuse underfoot, disconcertingly close. Claire froze, the saliva in her mouth drying up.

The shadowy fingers on the building opposite her lengthened and then halted. Claire caught her breath and didn’t blink. Honking and voices from the street barely filtered into her arrested awareness. The fingers reversed and came back in her direction.

Claire balanced, ready to take flight. Run. That’s all she could do. She wanted to tap her magick, use her best weapon. Her fingers tingled with the desire to do it.

A daaeman face appeared above her. “Got you.”

His huge hands came down on her shoulders and squeezed. Tears burst into her eyes from the pain. She struggled and his grip dropped to her wrists making her yelp.

The second Atrika grabbed the first around the waist and hauled him back away from her. “She’s mine!” he growled.

The first daaeman who’d grabbed her—Claire believed he was called Tevan—gathered himself from where he’d been knocked to the pavement. With a low growl trickling from his throat, he launched himself at the second. Both their eyes glowed red and their teeth had extended.

Killing rage.

Claire stood for a split second, watching the daaeman face off. If the magick Rue had imbued her with was elium, it was very valuable to them. Of course they’d fight over it. Within her lay all their hopes and dreams of victory against the ruling Ytrayi. They would each want control of it.

Lucky her to carry such a treasure.

Claire bolted.

Realizing they’d lost their prey, the Atrika stopped their territorial dispute and followed her.

Ducking low and swerving, she just evaded Tevan’s grasp and shot out of the alley, dodging tall silver cans, lumpy black sacks, and jumping over discarded boxes. Her shoes, made for the sleek marble floors of the palace, hadn’t fared well on the concrete pathways of Earth. Shredded on the bottom, they provided little protection.

Something sharp stabbed her sole and she yelped, feeling a gush of hot, sticky blood. She cursed in Aemni, one of the languages commonly spoken among all the breeds. Now she was leaving a perfect trail for them.

She careened out into the street and nearly collided with a man. He yelled at her as she dove around him and sped down the sidewalk.

Across the way, a flood of people exited a building, spilling out into the night-dark streets under a brightly lit overhanging sign, talking and laughing. Knowing a crowd was her only chance, Claire detoured, pounding across the road. The shiny fast-moving conveyances—cars, that’s what they were called—honked and swerved.

She plunged into the crowd on the other side, scattering those directly around her with surprised gasps. Risking a glance backward, she saw the two Atrika had reached the street and had spotted her. They made their way toward her.

“Help! Help me!” Her voice sounded rusty and she choked on the English. She’d used it with Rue when he wanted practice and with the earth witch, Thomas, when he’d been trapped in Yrystrayi. Otherwise she hadn’t spoken it since her mother had died.

The people around her appeared alarmed. Most didn’t look at her. They pretended she wasn’t standing there asking for aid in tattered shoes and a torn, dirty dress that provided no protection against the cold bite of the air. Some glanced at her with pity on their faces; others smirked and talked behind their hands. A woman pressed one of the pieces of green paper into her palm. Claire stared down at it, uncomprehending. She’d asked for help, not money.

“Please, the daae—demons,” she whispered. “The Atrika demons will get me.”

The Atrika would crack the seat of her magick open to get the elium. Crack her like a nut for the meat inside. How had Rue ever expected her to succeed? One aeamon servant against two motivated Atrika daaeman?

She closed her eyes, reliving the moment when the Atrika had forced the door of the Ytrayiportal chamber down. The burst of brilliant magick, the bellows and war whoops, the Atrikaall in a killing rage. Rue could even now be dead. There was no help in her immediate future. Even if Rue had survived, it would take a long time to open another doorway, even longer for Rue to track her down.

A hand curled over her shoulder, startling her. She looked up into a handsome male face. Elegant, sloping brown brows, green eyes, a smile. “Come with me,” the man said. “There’s a diner just up the way. We’ll get a meal and see what we can do to help you.”

Her gaze flicked back to the daaeman crossing the street. They were growing very close now. She grabbed the man’s arm. “Yes, let’s go.”

He patted her hand. “It’s all right. Calm down now, okay?”

She glanced backward at her pursuers. “Let’s stay with the crowd. Do you mind?”

“Of course not. Will the crowd keep the . . . demons . . . away?”

Oh, thank all Four Houses and the Patrons! He understood. She nodded emphatically. “They won’t hurt me if I’m with humans. They don’t want to incite an interdimensional incident.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Ah. Let’s go then. What’s your name?”

“Claire.”

“Claire, what a lovely name. What’s your last name?”

She didn’t answer because she didn’t know it. Her mother had never told her. She only shook her head and glanced away, embarrassed. Were surnames very important here? A mark of class, perhaps?

As they walked, the man flipped open a small black object, punched some buttons and spoke into it. Claire didn’t pay attention to what he said, she was too focused on the daaeman following them. They kept their distance now, but they would stalk her until they found her alone and vulnerable. All she’d done was buy herself some time.

Claire hoped the humans had some way of dealing with Atrika. She’d heard one had been stuck here without a doorway for many years. The witches had dealt with that one. Perhaps the elemental witches were rulers in this place. It would make sense, considering their abilities. Although that didn’t explain all the blank looks she got when she asked about them. At least she’d found one man who understood about the Atrika. Hopefully, he’d know how to find Thomas Monahan.

The good news—if there was good news—was that there were only two Atrika and no more could follow, since Rue had destroyed the doorway.

A hysterical laugh bubbled up from her depths. She was penniless and lost in a foreign world she hadn’t walked on since she was six years old and there only two Atrika who were chasing her. That was the good news?

The man looked concerned when she laughed. He hesitated, then pulled the door of a restaurant open for her. “We’re here.” Claire’s mind had been spinning so hard, she hadn’t even noticed they’d reached their destination.

She entered a small establishment, glancing at her surroundings. People sat belly up to a long counter. Others sat in the booths near the large front window that gave a view of the darkened street. Most of the restaurant’s patrons turned and looked at her, making Claire self-conscious about her clothing and dirt-smudged face.

“No vagrants in here,” said a skinny, sharp-faced waitress wielding a pot of some dark, unidentifiable liquid.

Horror shot through Claire. “I am not a vagrant.” She glanced away, knowing full well she looked like one. She’d been—was—handmaiden to the Cae of the Ytrayi daaeman breed. Slave, perhaps, but slave to the master. That meant the best of everything, even though she’d been property.

The man set a hand to her shoulder. “Of course you aren’t.” Then he turned to the waitress. “It’s okay. I’m a clinical psychologist and . . .” He pulled the waitress aside and spoke in low tones to her. The waitress nodded and glanced at her.

Claire’s intuition niggled. This was not a good thing.

That had not been a good glance.

A clinical psychologist? Her mind sorted through the notebooks filled with English lessons and vocabulary her mother had left her. A psychologist was a physician of the mind. Why had he mentioned that to the waitress? Did he think Claire was crazy?

She sucked in a breath. Her alarm factor ratcheted upward. She had to get out of here. What had seemed like a safe refuge a moment ago didn’t seem so anymore. Houses, she had no idea who to trust in this world, which meant she could trust no one.

The next morning, Elsa woke late. She pushed the hair from her face. Fine strands were stuck to her cheek; she’d cried in her sleep.

Good. Better to cry at night when no one could see. She didn’t want to reveal her weakness to this new family.

She went to the washstand and splashed lukewarm water on her face, then she brushed her teeth and combed her hair.

Last night, as she’d unpacked, she’d realized how wrong her clothes were for farm life. She was a town girl; what did she know about life on the land? All she’d brought were crepe dresses and silk stockings and heels. Church clothes.

She slipped into her plainest day dress, a charcoal-gray with pearl buttons and lace at the collar, then pulled up her stockings and stepped into the black heels she’d worn yesterday.

The house smelled of bacon and coffee. Her stomach grumbled, reminding her she hadn’t eaten since yesterday’s lunch.

The kitchen—a bright yellow wallpapered room with gingham curtains and white linoleum flooring—was empty. Dishes drying on the counter attested to the fact that Elsa had slept through breakfast. What time did these people waken? It was only nine.

Elsa stepped out onto the porch and saw the Martinelli farm in full sunlight. Hundreds of acres of harvested wheat fanned out in all directions, a sea of rough burnished gold, with the homestead part taking up a few acres in the middle of it all.

A driveway cut through the fields, a brown ribbon of dirt bordered by cottonwoods and fencing. The farm itself consisted of the house, a big wooden barn, a horse corral, a cow paddock, a hog pen, a chicken coop, and a windmill. Behind the house was an orchard, a small vineyard, and a fenced vegetable garden. Mrs. Martinelli was in the garden, bent over.

Elsa stepped down into the yard.

Mr. Martinelli came out of the barn and approached her. “Good morning,” he said. “Walk with me.”

He led her along the edge of the wheat field; the shorn crop struck her as broken, somehow, devastated. Much like herself. A gentle breeze rustled what remained, made a shushing sound.

“You are a town girl,” Mr. Martinelli said in a thick Italian accent. “Not anymore, I guess.”

“This is a good answer.” He bent down, scooped up a handful of dirt. “My land tells its story if you listen. The story of our family. We plant, we tend, we harvest. I make wine from grapes that I brought here from Sicily, and the wine I make reminds me of my father. It binds us, one to another, as it has for generations. Now it will bind you to us.”

“I’ve never tended to anything.”

He looked at her. “Do you want to change that?”

Elsa saw compassion in his dark eyes, as if he knew how afraid she’d been in her life, but she had to be imagining it. All he knew about her was that she was here now and she’d brought his son down with her.

“Beginnings are only that, Elsa. When Rosalba and I came here from Sicily, we had seventeen dollars and a dream. That was our beginning. But it wasn’t what gave us this good life. We have this land because we worked for it, because no matter how hard life was, we stayed here. This land provided for us. It will provide for you, too, if you let it.”

Elsa had never thought of land that way, as something that anchored a person, gave one a life. The idea of it, of staying here and finding a good life and a place to belong, seduced her as nothing else ever had.

She would do her best to become a Martinelli through and through, so she could join their story, perhaps even take it as her own and pass it on to the child she carried. She would do anything, become anyone, to ensure that this family loved the baby unconditionally as one of their own. “I want that, Mr. Martinelli,” she said at last. “I want to belong here.”

He smiled. “I saw that in you, Elsa.”

Elsa started to thank him, but was interrupted by Mrs. Martinelli, who called out to her husband as she walked toward them carrying a basket full of ripe tomatoes and greenery. “Elsa,” she said, coming to a stop. “How nice to see you up.”

“I . . . overslept.”

Mrs. Martinelli nodded. “Follow me.”

In the kitchen, Mrs. Martinelli took the vegetables from her basket and laid them on the table, plump red tomatoes, yellow onions, green herbs, clumps of garlic. Elsa had never seen so much garlic at one time.

“What can you cook?” she asked Elsa, tying an apron on. “C-coffee.”

Mrs. Martinelli stopped. “You can’t cook? At your age?” “I’m sorry, Mrs. Martinelli. No, but—”

“Can you clean?”

“Well . . . I’m sure I can learn to.”

Mrs. Martinelli crossed her arms.“What can you do?” “Sew. Embroider. Darn. Read.”

“A lady. Madonna mia.” She looked around the spotless kitchen. “Fine. Then I will teach you to cook. We will start with arancini. And call me Rose.”

Woodrow Wilson Nickel died in the year 2025, on a usual day, in the usual way, at the rather unusual age of 105.

A century and a nickel.

The young VA hospital long-term care liaison assigned to dispatch his worldly possessions to survivors––which in Woodrow Wilson Nickel’s case was an ancient military footlocker and no survivors at all––stood in his vacant room. Determined to keep on schedule, she checked the time. Her job made her feel like some Gatekeeper of Things Left Behind. especially with centenarians gone long before their hearts stopped beating. They were the only ones with footlockers anymore. And old footlockers with nowhere to go were the worst, their contents full of mortal meaning departed with the departed as if she could actually see the past vanish into thin air. 

So she took a deep breath and opened the old trunk, expecting to find the usual musty uniforms and faded photographs. 

Instead she found a giraffe. 

The footlocker was full of ruled writing pads, dozens of them, stacked in bundles bound with twine. Perched on top with a yellowed newspaper article was the giraffe, a tiny antique porcelain souvenir from the San Diego Zoo. Despite herself, she smiled wistfully and picked it up. As a child, she’d seen a whole group of the tall, gentle giants at the zoo before they’d become so horribly rare.

Gently setting down the giraffe, she picked up the first batch of pads to move them aside when the top pad’s large old-man scrawl caught her eye. She eased onto the edge of the bed and read it closer:

Few true friends have I known and two were giraffes, one that didn’t kick me dead and one that saved my worthless orphan life and your worthy, precious one.

They’re both long gone. And soon I’ll be gone, which will be no great loss to be sure. But the man on the TV just said that soon there’ll be no more giraffes in the world at all, gone with the tigers and the elephants and the old man’s sky-blanketing pigeons. Even as I punched d the screen to shut him up, I knew it could be true. 

Somehow, though, I know there is still you. If it goes extinct, too, with my old bag of bones, that’d be a crying shame––my shame. Because if ever I could claim to have seen the face of God, it was in the colossal faces of those giraffes. And if even ever I should be leaving something behind, it’s this story from them and for you. 

So, here and now, before it’s too late, I am writing to all down on the chance a good soul reads these words and helps them find their way to you. 

With that, the VA liaison untied the first batch and, forgetting all about her schedule, began to read…

Baghdad, 2002

Huda paced her backyard, trying to brush off her spat with her husband. In the distance, above al-Dora refinery, columns of flames pierced the night. An easterly wind pushed the stench of the burning gas away from New Baghdad, so all Huda could smell were the orange and apricot trees by the fence. She knew the wind could turn at any time, but right then the gas flares were beautiful, like candles lined up on a giant’s birthday cake.

The bell rang at the front gate. Huda paused mid-step and wondered, Had Abdul Amir forgotten his keys when he stormed off to the coffee shop? Or had her husband cooled down and decided to eat dinner with her after all? Huda hurried inside through the kitchen door. A nougat box lay spread-eagled on the counter, cellophane wrappers strewn like evidence of a hasty crime. Huda frowned and swept them into the bin. So much for her diet.

The bell sounded again. Something in its flat, insistent tone made her falter. She scurried down the hallway, heels slapping against the tile. In the foyer, she paused by a console table decorated with family portraits. The largest of the pewter frames faced the wall. Huda flipped it around. The president stared back at her, eyes dark as tar. Medals marched across his chest.

She quickly moved the president’s portrait to a prominent position between a photo of her and Abdul Amir on their wedding day, and a snap of their son, Khalid, wearing a suit and tie at his thirteenth birthday party. Next, she set to work unlocking the front door: unlatching chains, turning keys, sliding dead bolts. She ran her hands over her hair and heaved open the door. Two secret police officers strode down the driveway.

Huda quivered. Lock the bolts; hide under the bed, she thought. But she knew that wouldn’t work. These men were like dogs: show fear and they bite. Behind them, the padlock from the gate lay in chunks on the concrete. The broken metal caught the glare of the floodlights over the carport. The larger of the two men shoved a pair of bolt cutters into the pocket of his leather jacket. Huda imagined his pockets contained all sorts of instruments: for breaking, slicing, and prizing apart.

“As-salaam alaikum.” Her voice wobbled. “What brings you here tonight, my countrymen?”

“Sister, my apologies for a visit at the dinner hour,” called Abu Issa, the older and slighter of the two men. He too was wearing a boxy leather jacket. Men like him were never without them, night or day, even when the sun scorched the blue from the sky and the bitumen on the roads melted into sticky pools.

Without waiting for an invitation, Abu Issa and his bolt-cutting partner barreled through the front door. Their bulk filled the foyer and pushed the oxygen out. Huda retreated down the hallway, careful not to turn her back. The men followed. Sand crunched beneath their boots—no amount of sweeping could keep the desert out. The fine grains went where they wanted, just like the officers of the mukhabarat.

Click here for the excerpt to The Paris Library