Dedication

To Eric—the wind chimes to my wind, my lighthouse on the hill, a secret treehouse, and all my best metaphors. This one is, of course, for you. Always.

Chapter One

Not all hauntings begin with a bump in the night.

In the isolated farmhouse, Helen could hear every bump the forest produced. Every owl, every coyote, every leaf brushing against the eaves in the darkness.

Helen had never believed in hauntings before, but tragedy changes people. Two years earlier, one night in the city had ruined her life—and the aftermath had turned her into a hopeless insomniac. That’s why she often found herself awake at strange hours, like she was now at half past three. She drifted into the kitchen of the farmhouse while her husband, Wade, slept soundly in their bedroom at the end of the hall. He hadn’t even stirred when she’d carefully peeled back the covers and left his side. If all the trees in the forest suddenly toppled over in the night, Helen suspected Wade would sleep through the crash.

She was glad he could find sleep so easily.

Well, sometimes.

Last week, Wade had said, “Just drink some lavender tea before bed.” He’d said it in a pleased tone, like he’d expertly cracked the case. It had taken a lot of willpower for Helen to not break the dinner plate she was holding at the time.

As she aimlessly crossed the quiet kitchen now, a floorboard groaned beneath her foot. For a moment, she wondered if the sound was the aging wood or if it was actually the sound of her soul. Because even though she was just shy of thirty-four, she already felt like an old house with floorboards that speak when no one is looking. It wasn’t that her body was old. It was her heart, her mind. In the middle of the night, sometimes she imagined she was becoming the house. With each passing season, they were merging into each other a little bit more. She never told Wade any of this. There are some things you can’t say out loud.

And she certainly didn’t have many people to talk to anymore. The seclusion here had been a choice, but it felt different than Helen had imagined when she’d chosen to leave Seattle behind eighteen months ago and live off the grid with Wade. But then, things rarely turn out how one imagines. She certainly hadn’t imagined when she’d married her first husband, Tyler, that she’d lose him to such a horrible act of violence in a city they’d both loved.

No one plans for acts of violence.

And no one plans for hauntings.

Unless they do.

But these were not the things Helen wanted to think about on this October night. She filled a glass of water from the sink and sipped it slowly.

That’s when the coyotes started howling.

She set the glass on the wooden countertop as she felt her breath quicken. She wanted to go outside and see them. She often had that fleeting thought when she was sleepless and alone with the howls, but this time it was a real urge.

In the back of her mind, she knew paying a visit to a pack of wild animals could be dangerous. But this was the ninth night in a row that Helen was awake, and it was the ninth night in a row she’d heard the coyotes in the forests. If she still had her cell phone, she could have looked up the statistics: Have coyotes ever killed humans? She had posed the question to Wade once many weeks ago, and he’d said that coyotes usually just killed dogs, but there had been a couple of rare instances where they’d killed humans. Helen knew all about rare instances. Her life was one.

She went from the kitchen into the living room to get her thick, button-up sweater from the reading chair, determined now to find out if the coyotes howled in unison because they were feeling an understood solidarity, like a choir of voices, or if it was sorrow in their high-pitched wails. She needed to know if they were running in frenzied circles or sitting serenely. That way, in the future, she could picture it in her mind correctly.

She put the sweater on over her long cream nightgown. She would take a lantern and walk in moonlight just close enough to see them in the distance. If she heard snarls, signs they were fighting or tearing apart prey, she would turn back. She would never tell Wade about it. The memories of the coyotes would be something she could think about when he was away working in the woods and she was home alone as the day stretched out to the tick tock of the clock.

The more nights Helen spent awake, the more she felt like a creature of the night herself, and she’d rather be a creature of the night than a house falling into disrepair. Besides, coyotes were nothing compared to masked men who broke into city apartments. Some events are so shattering they reset all context and proportion, and everything thereafter is perceived in comparison. In the context of her life, coyotes were weeping night dogs, and anyone who was afraid of that had never known true fear.

She spotted her boots by the fireplace. Her entire book collection sat there atop the mantel: Edgar Allan Poe, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, John Keats, W. B. Yeats. Maybe instead of roaming the dark, she should push out her nagging thoughts with lines of poetry. The inside of the house was cool—the day’s fires in the living room fireplace and the kitchen wood stove long burned out—but under the starry sky it would be much colder. She didn’t know how far she’d have to go to find the coyotes. A nightgown, sweater, and boots might not be near enough clothes, but if she went to their bedroom in the back of the house to get more layers, she might wake Wade. The dresser drawer had a terrible catch on it and screeched every time, and then he’d tell her, Stop it. Come to bed.

Perhaps Helen wasn’t a creature of the night after all. Creatures of the night didn’t ponder these details. They smelled a whiff of danger and ran toward it, not away.

If Helen had any sighs left in her body, this would have been the moment when she would have sighed, but all of her sighs had long ago been depleted. Instead, she drifted to the fireplace and ran her fingers over the books that lined the mantel. Down the spine of each, soothing little letters in serif fonts. Her cathedral. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she didn’t even read them. She just stood in front of them, taking in the sight, listening to the sounds outside.

The forest was a quiet place, and yet that quiet magnified everything. In the spring, it was the frogs. In the summer, it was the crickets. And always, it was the coyotes. Now that it was autumn, leaves were beginning to rustle, and some nights the rain dripped on the eaves.

But in that moment, Helen heard something else.

A thud. Outside the farmhouse. It came from the direction of the storage shed, and it was not the sound of wild animals but human-created. Her immediate judgment: a break-in. The shed door kicked in perhaps.

The nearest neighbor lived a few miles away, so if Helen and Wade were attacked, no one would hear their cries for help. She thought of that often.

But crying out for help in the city hadn’t done her or Tyler any good either.

Now she was smarter, though. Now she had other protection. Behind all those books of poetry on the mantel, there was a small wooden box, and inside that box, there was a gun.

Helen pulled the revolver from the box and quickly opened the chamber. Unless Wade had removed the bullets, there would be no reason for the chamber to be empty, and as she spun it, she found it full, as expected. She wanted to be sure that if she pulled the trigger the person she was pointing the gun at was going to die.

Wearing only her nightgown, sweater, and stockings on her feet, her long hair tumbling down her back, Helen crept into the kitchen. She peered out the window next to the front door, but all she saw was darkness.

She listened. Hearing nothing, not even the coyotes anymore, she opened the door and stepped from the safety of the kitchen into the inky stillness outside. With the adrenaline coursing through her, she didn’t feel the coldness of the air.

She lifted the gun and shouted.

Chapter Two

“This is private property! You’re trespassing!” Helen yelled, her voice like a forgotten vinyl record, scratchy in places where it used to be bold and clear.

Gripping the gun with both hands, she stepped cautiously away from the open door and onto the front porch. The old farmhouse sat in the middle of a large clearing, a one-story relic dwarfed by the trees that surrounded it like patient invaders. The moon cast an eerie glow against the peeling paint on the house’s siding, the yard’s overgrown weeds, the rusty wheelbarrow.

Helen’s next shout was louder, braver, and it echoed through the trees. “I have a gun!”

She paused and listened. Silence layered upon silence. Yet somehow, even after the echo of her shout faded away, it felt like the last word remained there in the air. Gun.

She squinted against the darkness as she descended the two wooden steps into the front yard. Opposite the house, her vegetable garden made strange shapes against the night. Next to it, Wade’s storage shed sat with its door open. It was too dark to clearly see inside, but she now felt certain the noise she’d heard was the sound of that door thudding open.

Someone must be in the shed.

For the briefest moment, Helen had the urge to empty all of the bullets into the open shed. But no, of course she couldn’t do that. Not every intruder came with the intention to kill, even if her experience with home invasions told her they did.

Instead, she yelled, “You’re trespassing, and you need to leave!”

She slowly crossed the yard to the shed, pausing every so often to listen, her stocking feet sinking occasionally into a spot of soft earth. The ground was still somewhat firm from the dry summer, but the increasing rains were starting to form spongy patches throughout the yard. If she had to run, she could easily slip in one of those spots.

She looked back at the open farmhouse door, suddenly seized with the idea that while her focus had been on the shed, someone could have snuck behind her into the house.

Wade was asleep inside, weaponless.

In the side yard out of her view, Wade’s old ax would be wedged into a stump, and chopped wood would be neatly stacked against the house. Normally she never gave that old ax a second thought, but now she realized that it could be taken and used against them.

The idea flooded her blood with electric fear. She took off in a run, and when she rounded the side of the house, she half expected to find the stump bereft of its ax, but it was there, sharp blade stuck into the wood.

Holding the gun in her right hand, she worked at the ax with her left, but it wouldn’t pull free. She looked around uneasily and was met with only the quiet night, so she set the gun in the grass and grabbed the ax handle with both hands. She yanked hard, stumbling back a half step when it came free.

She quickly transferred the ax to her left hand and picked up the gun with her right.

Ready.

After Tyler was killed, Helen had taken shooting lessons at the gun range. She’d gone again and again until she was confident and accurate. She always shot best when she held a gun with two hands, though.

This particular gun, Wade’s revolver, had a heavy trigger on it. To keep her aim steady, she needed to use both her right and left index fingers when she fired it.

“Never cock the gun,” Wade had told her.

Helen cocked the gun. Now it was a hair trigger, and she could easily shoot it one-handed.

Gripping the ax with her left hand, she pointed the gun with her right and walked cautiously back toward the shed. She kept her index finger resting along the gun’s frame.

“I’m approaching with a gun! Step out slowly. Show your hands!”

A howl sounded in the distance. The coyotes were starting up again.

As she got closer, she heard a rustle inside the shed and tightened her grip on the ax. There was no way she could effectively swing an ax one-handed though, especially with her left. Helen wasn’t a wisp of a woman, but she’d never impressed anyone with her strength either. She was average height, slim but fit from working the property. She could chop wood herself but preferred to let Wade do it because axes felt unwieldy.

Helen stopped several feet from the shed, not wanting to give her would-be assassin the opportunity to spring from the shadows and grab the ax before she could fire the gun.

“Hello?” she called out tentatively, her nerve fading.

She should have woken Wade.

Suddenly, near the ground at the shed’s entrance, two pinpricks of light began to glow. Eyes. Yellow.

Helen’s finger moved to the trigger as a small creature scrambled out of the shed. The yellow eyes gleamed at her from its shrunken face, and she realized it was just a raccoon.

It stopped and stared at her, and she had the strangest sensation that it felt sorry for her. They both waited to see what the other’s move would be until, finally, Helen stomped her foot, and the raccoon bared its teeth and skittered away.

From the entrance, Helen could see only the vague shape of Wade’s supplies piled on the shelves and leaning against the walls, but somehow she knew the shed was empty. No one was there after all. The latch on the door had simply come undone.

She tossed the ax onto the grass and closed the door to the shed, gingerly handling the rough wood. That stupid door had given her more than a few splinters. Then she picked up the ax and turned back toward the house.

In the early days with Wade, this place had held a hopeful kind of charm. If a stranger were to venture all the way down their long dirt driveway and not notice Wade’s ’60s Ford pickup truck parked under the red alder tree, the stranger would think he’d stumbled upon a snapshot from a hundred years ago, with Helen and Wade presenting as a couple from the early 1900s.

Every day, Helen wore one of the dresses she’d sewn herself, different fabrics but only slight variations of the same pattern, the only pattern she’d been able to master. It had taken her seven months to get it right. Before that, her dresses had looked like gunnysacks, and she’d cinched them at the waist with fabric belts. But she’d kept at it. She certainly had the time to practice, and now the dresses were pretty. Fitted in the bodice, loose skirt.

Wade’s attire was less remarkable: work pants, shirt, boots, jacket in muted colors. Men’s utilitarian clothing was timeless in many ways. Only hats had noticeably changed over the years. Wade normally didn’t wear one, but when he did it was either a flat cap or a narrow-brimmed felt cowboy hat. When they had first dated in the city, he had worn a baseball cap to dinner once and he’d looked good in it, boyish almost, which was unusual for a man who awoke with a five o’clock shadow. The outdated hats he wore now made him look like an actor at the dinner theater. But who was she to judge? She was spending her days dressed like Virginia Woolf.

Helen hadn’t been to a salon either since disappearing into the woods. No more subtle highlights and long layers fashionably cut into her hair. Now it hung halfway down her back in waves, a soft brown. Sometimes she braided it. Sometimes she wrapped it into a bun. Sometimes she twisted it into a coil and wrapped it around her neck just to imagine what a noose might feel like.

Helen rounded the corner of the house to find the side yard empty still. She set the gun in the grass and gripped the ax handle with both hands, set her feet, and gave it a good swing. The blade landed squarely in the middle of the stump just like she’d found it.

As she retrieved the gun from the grass, a chilling feeling crept back over her. She spun in a circle, listening, looking, but seeing nothing. She continued cautiously around the house until she was standing at the back of it, peering out at the dark, thick trees beyond the open meadow. Nothing there either. Just the silhouette of branches, gnarled like monster arms.

And yet, she sensed a presence.

The longer she stood there, the more she realized it didn’t feel menacing.

In moments like this, her heart always expanded a little, opened up in hopes that it was Tyler finally visiting her. He was a man who had loved her so much in this world, every one of her little weird eccentricities. He used to gaze at her like she grew flowers from her eyes and diamonds from her smile, and if there was a way for him to reach back to this time and place, she knew he would. And so, always, she was waiting.

“Tyler?” she whispered. Just in case.

The only answer she heard was the murmur of wind through the trees. Then a gentle breeze lifted a strand of hair across her face, like a caress.

She closed her eyes, and that’s when she heard the footsteps.

Helen turned back just as a dark figure stepped around the corner of the house.

Chapter Three

Helen raised the gun and pointed it right at Wade’s chest, but for a moment, she didn’t see her husband in his maroon pajamas. For a moment, she was standing face-to-face with the masked man once again, gun in her hand, life or death stakes. Split-second choice.

Wade put his hands up, open palms imploring. “Helen!”

Helen blinked. Wade. Her husband. Her new husband, that is. She lowered the gun.

“Don’t do that.” Helen shook her head. “You startled me.”

She pointed the gun at the ground and uncocked the hammer.

“Did you have that cocked? Jesus.”

Helen didn’t respond. Wade already knew the answer.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I heard something.”

“So did I.”

She lifted her head, alert again. “You did?”

“Yeah. My wife outside, shouting.”

She stared at him. This man had been curled up under blankets in his cozy flannel pajamas while she’d been the one making sure their home wasn’t under attack. This time it was nothing. Next time it could be something, and if it was, she’d be ready. But apparently her vigilance was a nuisance. Perhaps he wanted an ax driven into his skull.

“There’s no one out here, Helen.”

“I heard something.”

“Because we’re surrounded by one thousand three hundred and fourteen acres of wild.”

One thousand three hundred and fourteen acres. A perfect place to hide.

Wade extended his hand, and at first Helen thought he was reaching out to comfort her. Then she realized he was demanding she hand over the gun.

“There was no one out here last time,” he said, “and there’s no one out here this time.”

Wade was a man who kept score. He couldn’t just say thirteen hundred acres like a normal person. No, he had to say one thousand three hundred and fourteen acres like some kind of accounting maniac. And he couldn’t just reassure her that she was safe. He had to remind her that she was wrong, yet again.

Seeing her expression, he softened his tone. “Come here.”

He opened his arms and she stepped into them, an automatic response. In the beginning, Wade’s protective embrace had reassured her.

“You’re safe with me, Helen.”

He gently removed the gun from her hand.

In the living room, Wade put the gun back into the box on the mantel and explained to Helen how her lack of sleep was putting her on edge. “If you can’t sleep, the last thing you should do is get out of bed.” He was using his patient voice that belied his actual impatience with the situation. “No one ever fell asleep standing in the middle of their kitchen.”

She wanted to say “Have you ever considered opening a fucking sleep clinic?” with extra emphasis on fucking. Instead she said, “I know that,” with no emphasis on any syllables.

Wade had met Helen when her mind was in tatters, when she was washing down a doctor-prescribed pill each morning with a glass of orange juice and trying to ignore the dry mouth and dizziness it gave her. That first night in a sticky neighborhood dive bar, she’d told him she kept thinking she was seeing her dead husband in the streets, in the stairwell of her apartment complex, at the grocery store, but Wade hadn’t really understood. People who have never lost their mind don’t really comprehend it when you tell them that you have.

The gun safely stowed away, Wade turned back from the mantel and approached her with a sympathetic look. “You just need to stop thinking so much.”

He put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed tenderly.

She nodded. He wasn’t wrong.

So far, reading poetry was the best method Helen could come up with to get rid of unwanted thoughts. Wine just made her feel like openly weeping, and cookies and cake stuck in her throat and settled like cement in her stomach. Words took her away from her body.

In some ways, words had also brought her to this place.

In 1854, Henry David Thoreau had written, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.”

Helen had seen it quoted on the side of a Seattle city bus that was idling while she waited on the corner. She had been on a lunch break from the marketing job she was barely holding on to in the months after Tyler’s death. The bus exhaust had been acrid in her nose. Not very romantic, but the message had been so blatant that she couldn’t help but wonder if Tyler had sent it to her from the afterlife.

And so she had thought to herself, Maybe I could do that. Maybe I could get away from the city and the memories that hurt too much.

After Thoreau’s sentence had found her, she began to repeat it in her mind. Whenever she’d been struck hard with flashbacks to the violence or whenever she felt the ache of despair, the recitation distracted her.

Only two weeks later, she’d met Wade at the bar, and it felt like a second sign. Wade was new to the city, but he was a man who wanted to live off the grid, who wanted to revert to an old-fashioned life. She had looked at him and imagined that his angular jaw equaled persistence and sincerity, so when he’d told her his dreams, she’d listened to them with an unguarded curiosity. He was only a few years older than her, but his aspirations made him seem worldly and wise. He’d painted pictures of it in her mind, and she’d been able to see it so clearly: planting a garden, sewing her own dresses, stitching his work shirts, and cooking over a cast-iron stove. He was planning to power a few necessities with a battery system and generators, but otherwise, there’d be no reliance on modern technology. It was the farthest thing she could imagine from the fast-paced city life she’d once shared with Tyler. The idea was so radically different that it had seemed like it might be the only thing that could make sense of the mess.

Wade was salt of the earth. A little handsome, a little more gruff, and when he’d kissed her at the end of their first date, she’d felt the protection in his callused hand against her cheek. He wore a Carhartt jacket like he’d been born in it and was built like he’d been destined to be a college linebacker. He told her he’d never played any sports, though.

“No time,” he’d said. “Not with how busy I always was working the family farm.”

The family farm? In that moment, Helen had barely even realized people still were farmers. Of course, yes, she held a vague notion that the food she bought at the grocery store was grown in the earth by farmers, but she was such a city girl that sometimes it seemed like the whole world was run by machines. If any real people touched the crops, that was something special that happened in faraway places with faraway people. Farming felt like a thing of the past, something from the History Channel documentaries that she watched about Depression-era people fighting the grasshoppers and the rabbits. But Wade was a real farmer, and he’d been right there in front of her. That curious man had looked at her with hooded hazel eyes and said potatoes like he was talking about something godly. It was so enchantingly different that it made her forget herself for a while, and she felt the first sparks of something like attraction. All she’d known since Tyler’s death was the tight coil of grief, and the possibility of feeling something else had overwhelmed her with relief.

Even now, Helen knew that when Wade looked at her, he saw the damage there but only the surface of it. Mostly, he saw pretty and he saw creative. The dark circles under her eyes were just a sign to him that she needed a little saving, while the vintage furniture she’d refinished herself that he had seen in her city apartment signaled to him that she was resourceful and artistic.

So Helen had gone. Into the woods of the Pacific Northwest. Eighteen months ago.

She’d stopped mentally repeating Thoreau’s sentence about living deliberately and started doing it instead. And then she’d started searching for other sentences to fill her head when the past tried to creep in.

Edgar Allan Poe was her favorite now. He understood darkness.

She was sure that if Poe were here today, he would have marched into the woods tonight to see the coyotes. He would have howled along with them, lain down on the muddy ground and let them pick his bones clean. She was no Edgar Allan Poe though. She was just a woman who was once full of fire and was now tired of being tired.

And these days, Helen never felt more tired than when Wade tried to touch her, like he was doing now.

As his hand moved from her shoulder into her hair, he smiled at her, and she knew exactly what that hand and that smile meant, and she wanted to shrink away from it. She couldn’t, though, because it seemed like a great unfairness that the same touch that had felt good to her a year ago felt like an intrusion now. Unfair to both of them, really.

“Let’s go to bed,” he said, and again, she fought the desire to move away.

In moments like this, she tried to remind herself that there had been a chapter in her marriage to Tyler where she’d lost the thread to him temporarily. He had been the wind chimes to her wind, playing a song for her that lasted their whole eight and a half years together. Even still, there’d been a period of time when she had felt so far away from him, so far away from their marriage. She had found her way back to him though.

Maybe that was happening again.

Maybe she could afford Wade the same consideration she’d once given Tyler.

Helen also knew Wade would be tired tomorrow, and when he was tired, he was grumpy. Though he didn’t like to talk about it, she knew he missed farming. Their livelihood was instead in the timber on their property he’d bought shortly before they married. Wade managed the timber alone. Tomorrow, he needed to go out and mark more trees for thinning, and if he was tired while he worked, he’d be awful when he came home for dinner. He’d say that the potatoes were too hard and the broccoli too soft. If she could make tired worth his while he might not be so awful tomorrow evening.

So Helen melted into, not away from, his hand and smiled softly. “Okay,” she said.

In their bedroom, the air was crisp. The room was in the very back of the house, and only a little heat drifted down the hall during the daytime from the kitchen wood stove and the living room fireplace.

Wade stripped off his pajamas. Helen kept her nightgown on but stepped out of her underwear. She left the triangle of light blue cotton discarded in the middle of the hardwood floor. For a fleeting moment, she wondered what he would do if she wadded them up and shoved them in his mouth. Sex with Wade was always very ordinary—almost proper. She’d never done a single strange thing, nothing to provoke him or test him. The truth was, she had no desire to try anything of the sort with him, but sometimes she was curious how he would react. Probably he would get angry. He only ever referred to sex as “making love.”

Helen climbed into bed, straddling Wade, and leaned down to kiss him. His hands gripped her face and his lips pressed against hers, not so hard as to hurt, but enough that she could feel his hunger.

Then he rolled so he was on top, and his lips moved to her neck. His kisses felt empty on her skin, practiced, as he played the part of a man who kisses a woman’s neck, and she played the part of a woman who was getting more turned on, not less.

She moved her hands to his hair, searching for something to bring her back to the place she used to find with him in the beginning. His hair was soft and it reminded her that he’d been a little kid once upon a time, and that made her feel sad. No boy wants to grow up to marry a woman who loves him only a little. Maybe she wasn’t capable of loving anyone fully anymore. Maybe the small window in which she had felt passion for Wade had been a temporary trick of Mother Nature.

Helen pressed her body up into his.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

She could feel he was hard.

“Not quite,” she said.

He put his hand between her legs and could feel she wasn’t wet. He started to make a circular motion with the tip of his finger, but he was in the wrong place. She reached down and pressed his hand against the spot, showing him the right place and the right amount of pressure. It would be so much easier if he’d just put his mouth on her, but he only ever did that if she asked. Helen didn’t have the energy tonight to make requests.

So she let Wade use his hand until she was just wet enough to take him inside of her. What followed was another faded performance of something that had once felt promising enough it had actually prompted her to run away to the woods and plant carrots and strawberries. To move things along, she pretended to come, and then she wrapped her arms and legs around his body because she knew that would help him finish.

Afterward, Helen lay in bed next to Wade’s sleeping form, comforted by the fact that her IUD was good for at least another six months. She had no business being anybody’s mother.

Chapter Four

Helen didn’t feel like killing worms today. As she peered down at her Brussels sprouts in the garden, she couldn’t find the energy for it.

It was such a dreary morning. Gray clouds blotted out the sun, and the wind rattled a loose board on the farmhouse. The dirty white paint was peeling away in places, revealing the old wood siding beneath. Maybe I should do chores inside instead, she thought and looked toward the empty house. It had been built for a husband and wife shortly after World War I, and Helen wondered if she was staring at the same siding they had stared at a hundred years ago.

Wade always boasted how he got a “real deal” on the farmhouse. The son of the original owners had died in a nursing home without a will or next of kin, so Wade had scored the property at a state auction. Helen was pretty sure he got a “real deal” on it because the redbrick chimney was starting to tilt slightly to one side, and the land was in the middle of nowhere: a half-hour ferry ride across Puget Sound and another two hours by car. People came out this way to hike and ride horses in the nearby national forests more than they came here to make a life.

It was very peaceful though. That is, if you measured peace by quietude and nature and not by one’s thoughts. The house’s best feature was its wide front porch with the shaded overhang held up by thick columns. Helen rarely sat in the porch rocking chairs though, because that’s what she would have done with Tyler when they were old together, and now she didn’t want to do it with anyone else. Most days she floated across the porch and went straight to her garden.

The Brussels sprouts were getting close to harvest, and she had planned to check them for cabbage worms yesterday but had forgotten to do it. Neem oil could only do so much, so the worms needed to be picked off by hand, and you would think the more she had to do that, the less it would bother her, but it was the opposite. She’d come to closely associate Brussels sprouts with the squishy little caterpillars, and she cringed at how they hid in the folds of the vegetable. Eating the sprouts made her feel like she was eating worms. She used to love them. In the city, she’d walk into the grocery co-op and say, “One pound of Brussels sprouts, please,” and a lady in a cheerful apron would give her a container full of Brussels sprouts that someone else had planted, harvested, cut, cleaned, salted, and roasted. All she had to do was stick a fork in them and open her mouth.

They’d have carrots tonight instead, she decided.

Minutes later, she sat in the dirt and used a hand trowel to loosen the soil around the shoulder of a carrot. Then she grasped the carrot greens and tugged lightly, twisting. The carrot pulled free. It was nice and thick, and the orange shade was bright. She brushed off the soil before adding it to her basket.

As she worked, her eyes sometimes drifted to her surroundings. Peeking through the gray day, the early hints of autumn’s brilliant yellow and orange shouted their presence in the forest. Some of the thirstiest trees weren’t yet recovered from the dry summer, still brambly and dead-armed, but others were deepening into brown colors that signaled an approaching winter. Everything was in transition.

It was the beginning and the end.

Helen’s mind wasn’t really in the trees though; it was lost in the past.

Inside the kitchen, still deep in thought, she peeled the carrots for a dinner stew she’d made a million times before.

“Ow!”

She gripped her left hand in pain. After a moment, she stole a look and saw that she had cut her left index finger when the peeler had slipped. A tiny stream of blood trickled down across her middle finger and pooled around her wedding ring.

There were first aid supplies at the house. That had been one of her conditions when she had agreed to this lifestyle with Wade: She wanted modern medicine. So Helen sat on the edge of the clawfoot tub in the bathroom and tended to her cut with a tube of antibacterial ointment and a Band-Aid.

After she finished peeling the carrots, she put them in the refrigerator—another modern amenity that she had insisted upon—and went outside to get Wade’s work clothes from the clothesline. Washing clothes by hand was one of her least favorite tasks. The cold water made her hands hurt, and no matter how many times she rinsed and squeezed, she could still see soap suds in the water.

As she was folding Wade’s clothes into piles on top of their quilted bed, she noticed one of his shirts had a hole in the elbow. She retrieved her sewing kit and sat on the bed to thread a needle.

Helen often imagined that her own body had stitches running the length of her spine, barely holding her together. Take care of dangling threads, she wanted to warn people, or you might pull my entire soul loose.

She encountered few people though. There were the ones she saw in town during the once-monthly trip for supplies. And there was Agnes, the young woman who lived in the nearest house. Every so often, she hiked from her own property and through parts of the Olympic National Forest to visit Helen. Agnes hadn’t been by in weeks, and Helen was so ready to have a conversation with her, she was afraid she might start crying when she next saw Agnes emerge from the trees. Helen was keeping a list of things she wanted to tell her.

Town was twenty miles to the south. It had a grocery store that was really a glorified corner market that included general and tackle store items. There was also a post office, a library, a gas station, a pizza place, a flower shop, two taverns, a gun shop, several churches, and an elementary school. She wanted to check out books from the library, but the longest you could keep books was three weeks, and Wade said they didn’t need to go into town that often.

Each trip, Wade filled up his red gas cans with fuel for the generators, they bought food and supplies, checked their post office box, and Helen used the phone at the grocery store to call her parents. She always felt a flutter of anxiety beforehand, hopeful the call would go through and go well. She and Wade weren’t the only off-gridders who used that phone. A guy with a grubby beard had twice tied up the line until Wade had finally announced they had to “get back before dark,” as if dark were some pressing deadline. And since there was no designated call time, Helen’s parents had missed the call more than once. With no way for them to call her back, that meant she’d had to wait another month to try again. As much as she craved the familiarity of talking to her parents, the conversations were often disappointing: too brief and uncomfortably stilted. Helen was usually within earshot of shop employees or customers, and even worse, she and her mother were pretending Helen’s life hadn’t taken an utterly bizarre turn. The phone calls felt like a stage play, and everyone knew their part. Her parents were good at that.

They had been the only two guests at Helen and Wade’s courthouse wedding. Wade didn’t have any family to speak of since both of his parents were gone, and Helen hadn’t wanted to invite any of her friends because Tyler had been someone people adored. She didn’t want comparisons being drawn between him and Wade. Even her friend’s fear-aggressive rescue mutt had licked Tyler’s hand the first time they’d met. Everyone had laughed and rolled their eyes and said of course. She was just protecting Wade, she’d told herself. Helen’s parents had arrived ten minutes early with a beautiful bouquet of pink peonies. They were the type of parents who showed up without fail, but she had been able to plainly see the strain on their faces as they hugged her before the ceremony, and she could sense they wanted to ask if she was certain about marrying a man she’d known barely three months. But her parents were also the type of people who didn’t talk about hard things. Instead, they pretended things were okay, cosigners of an unspoken agreement that seemed to run through her extended family on both sides: aunts, uncles, cousins. Everybody just carried on. Helen sometimes wondered, if she’d had a sibling, would they have talked about the real things? She used to talk about real things with Tyler.

Even if the words were sometimes hollow, she still missed the sound of her mother’s voice in the weeks that stretched out between phone calls.

Helen hadn’t been able to call home in almost three whole months now, because she hadn’t gone to town on the last two supply runs. In September, she had been sick in bed when Wade went. Strange, since it’s hard to contract a virus when you have no contact with people. She’d been nauseous and vomiting and had briefly worried her IUD had failed. When her period had arrived four days later, she’d decided it was just a spell of heartsickness. She doubted that any regular doctor would diagnose it as such, but it was the only explanation that made sense to her. When Tyler had died, her heart had been broken into so many tiny pieces that sometimes it seemed like there was nothing left except for heart dust that stained everything she tried to touch. How could that not make her nauseous some days?

The month prior, August, Wade had gone into town without stopping by the house to pick her up. He’d driven directly from the trees and shown up after dark with bags of groceries. When she had looked out the window and seen him unloading the bags from his truck, she’d felt like a fist had closed around her throat. It was so thoughtless of him, and as she felt anger rising, the feeling was quickly replaced with something closer to humiliation. Was this a punishment of some kind?

She’d kept quiet as they’d unpacked the supplies together, rolling it over in her brain, and suddenly she’d wondered if it was because of their July trip. “Is this because I wanted pizza last time?”

Wade had looked at her like she was crazy, asked her what in the world was she talking about.

Helen wasn’t crazy. She still vividly remembered the way he’d reacted during their July trip when she’d suggested they eat dinner at the pizza place. He’d recoiled as though she’d suggested they drink the gasoline.

“Pizza is garbage food,” he’d said.

“So?”

“So why would you want pizza when we can eat good food?” He’d meant the animals he hunted and the vegetables she grew in the garden.

“Because I wouldn’t have to cook it,” she’d said, and she hadn’t masked the venom in her voice.

The following month, he’d gone to town without her.

Some things aren’t coincidences.

As the day plodded forward, the cold started to wrap around her. Despite the clouds, it had been a warm October morning, so she’d skipped making a fire when she woke up. Now she was beginning to feel the chill.

Outside, Helen gathered an armload of chopped wood from the tidy woodpile on the side of the house. In the living room, she arranged the wood inside the fireplace and struck a match. Then she just stood there, soaking in the warmth and gazing at her poetry books. She couldn’t face the dinner stew yet, chopping all those vegetables.

Helen pulled her Sylvia Plath poetry book from the collection and fanned through the pages. She hadn’t always read poetry. Before Tyler’s death, she’d read mostly historical fiction. She’d wanted exciting character arcs and climactic endings, not circular words.

Now poetry was all she could read. Oh, she missed all those castles and battles. The faraway worlds delivered the highest stakes of all—kingdoms on the brink of collapse. Yet none of those books had been able to hold her attention after Tyler was gone. The irony was that after his death she’d needed to escape from reality more than anything, but instead she’d found herself staring at the type on the paper, turning from page six to seven only to flip back to five and realize she had no idea what the name of the main character was. Her mind couldn’t hold the storyline when it was already crowded with the real one she was living and reliving. There was no castle wall tall enough to keep the memories out. Moats and spires. Memories of Tyler’s death could swim and fly right over it all.

And so Helen had given up reading altogether. For months.

Until the soggy Sunday she’d wandered into a used bookshop on Second Avenue. She’d had no umbrella with her, so her jeans had been wet all the way up her thighs to where her raincoat stopped, but she’d barely noticed the weight of the denim cling. She’d stared absently at the fiction section for a long time but not pulled a single book from the shelves.

Then she’d drifted into the poetry section.

The name Sylvia Plath had caught her eye. Helen had thought, oven; suicide. And then, Did her hair singe off of her scalp? And then, Wait, no. It must have been a gas oven. Of course. She simply faded away. Helen didn’t know why that had never occurred to her before. Previously, the thought of Sylvia’s death had been so horrifying that Helen had avoided actively imagining it but had vaguely assumed the woman cooked her own head.

That day in the shop, Helen had pulled the book from the shelf and opened it to the first page.

Ten pages later, she’d felt the knowledge heavy in her chest that Sylvia Plath was dead and buried and couldn’t write anymore, but she’d felt glad these pages lived on. Helen could finally read again. She had bought the book.

Sometimes when she read Sylvia’s poems, she couldn’t help but think about Sylvia and the oven. What disturbed Helen most of all was that she remembered being a person, lifetimes ago it seemed, who used to think, How in the world does a person stick her head in an oven and just turn it on?

But now Helen understood how sometimes it just comes to that.

Standing in front of the crackling fire, she slid the Plath book back onto the mantel and took down the thick hardbound W. B. Yeats compilation. Her favorite poem of his, “When You Are Old,” she’d read hundreds of times. On lonely nights, his words comforted her changing face and her pilgrim soul, as he so aptly described them, but her bookmark wasn’t tucked there. It was toward the back of the book, in the biography section. Only recently, she’d discovered the forty pages detailing Yeats’s unusual life, including his belief in ghosts and the occult. He’d been a member of a society called the Ghost Club, and he believed his poetry was delivered in part from the spiritual realm.

She reread a passage she’d circled last week in black ink:

Yeats believed that in death, we love with the same love and hate with the same hate. The tortured souls, the unresolved, they search for windows back into our world. If we grant them passage, ghosts can be just as real as the mortal walking. Yeats believed we lived with ghosts all around us.

Helen closed the book. She needed to summon her own ghost today.

Chapter Five

The cellar below was full of cobwebs. A door off the kitchen pantry led down a narrow set of stairs to the dim, dank concrete room with a low ceiling. There, Helen stored the food she’d jarred herself as well as the cans she’d bought at the store.

She also kept secrets down there.

When Helen had awoken that morning, it hadn’t been her intention to hold a séance. Her intention had been to get her chores done. Though she didn’t think of the things she did in the cellar as séances. She simply thought of it as talking to Tyler.

As Helen reached for the can of beans, her eyes drifted to the box tucked away on the lowest shelf. It was concealed behind her stack of how-to books—how to garden, how to can food, how to sew—all guides that she’d read hopefully at first, then half-heartedly, then begrudgingly, and now she was ready to throw the whole sorry bunch in the pond.

Candles peeked out from the top of the hidden box, and she felt the tug on her soul. She told herself that if she could get the stew simmering quickly enough, she would return and try.

But five minutes later, the can of beans was abandoned on the floor and burning candles were carefully arranged around her favorite photograph of Tyler. She had taken it herself when they had been at the ocean together. His sandy-colored hair lifted in the wind at a weird angle, but that sudden gust had made him forget himself for a second. Normally he would get camera-shy, but that time she’d managed to catch the playful glint in his blue eyes, the sparkle he often had when he looked at her. In that moment, Tyler wasn’t posing dutifully, like he usually did for her. No, he was just a man looking at her the way he always did, and she’d encapsulated it forever.

Helen stared down at Tyler’s face, the candlelight playing across the photo, then she closed her eyes, still holding its image in her mind.

“Tyler,” she said. “I just wanted to try again. I still think of you every day, every minute. Maybe you know that. I hope so.” She felt the pressure building behind her eyes. “I hear your name in my head. It’s caught in my throat, and it sits under my tongue, and it repeats inside me. All day long.”

In the beginning, his name in her head was like the ticking of a metronome. Tyler, Tyler, Tyler. Sometimes comforting, sometimes maddening. When it was the latter, she’d drive out the pounding of his name by holding the poetry lines there instead. Now she was so used to it that it felt almost like a second heartbeat.

Helen took a deep breath. “I’m trying, I am. I’m trying to be a good wife to Wade. I made this choice. I chose this road. I’ve made mistakes. I’m not perfect, I know that. You know that. It’s hard, though. I just . . .”

She was having a difficult time finding the words this time. “Do you remember the story you told me about the sailors who floated at sea?” Her voice cracked. Of course he remembered. The story had been a true one, a news piece from the 1980s. Three sailors had been lost at sea, their boat capsized. They’d survived for days by doing the dead man’s float. They’d waited it out, face down in the water, arms spread wide, bobbing up for breath every so often.

Helen was doing the dead man’s float every day. Initially she’d thought Wade was the rescue boat coming to pluck her from the sea, but she knew now that wasn’t the case. She was still floating, her face in waters that were darkening again the more days she spent out here with Wade. She didn’t need to explain that to Tyler, though. He knew.

Tears slipped out of her closed eyes as she whispered, “I think the coyotes are coming for me.” That was why they howled: to let her know she was next. Ridiculous, she knew. What a ridiculous thought, but she’d always been able to say ridiculous things out loud to Tyler. He’d always gently cradled her darkest thoughts.

Tyler, Tyler, Tyler.

Helen opened her eyes and wiped her face. “Tyler? I need to know you’re okay. I still need a sign, something from you. I still can’t figure any of this out. Why you’re gone and I’m here. None of it makes sense to me.”

She sat and waited. She waited for a long time that day in the cellar. Silence extended its icy fingers until, finally, she was shivering with it. Deep in her bones, she knew it was time for Tyler to reach out. She felt convinced it was possible, and then she felt angry he hadn’t found a way to do it yet.

“Tyler?” Nothing. Just the solitude. “Tyler?!”

Abruptly, Helen stood.

Upstairs, she opened the small wooden box on the mantel and pulled out the gun.

She wavered in front of the burning fireplace, staring down at the gun, as her tears fell onto the barrel. She stood there long enough in front of the fire that sweat broke on her brow and dripped down, and the blood began to seep through the bandage on her index finger. Her tears, her sweat, her blood, her pain—it was all pouring out of her, pouring onto the gun, pouring into her need to reach Tyler, until that need propelled her back into action.

Her feet pounded down the cellar stairs.

In front of the shrine, Helen shouted, “You want me to come to you, Tyler?” She cocked the gun and raised it to her temple. “I will!”

She closed her eyes, and her breathing quickened. She wasn’t sure if she believed in a monolithic God, but she believed the universe couldn’t just be random bacteria and a fireball that exploded. She believed Tyler’s soul was somewhere and she wanted to be with it, and if there was some type of God that so many churches preached about, she didn’t think He was a cruel one who sent suffering people to hell just because they couldn’t handle the pain of this physical realm.

She was going to do it, she was.

In mere seconds, there would be relief. It would be final.

She didn’t think of her parents in that moment, but it wasn’t because she was selfish. It was because she had spent almost two endless years feeling like an open wound, and the sorrow had blocked out the memories of times she’d laughed with them or shared interesting conversations. What she felt radiating from her parents these days on their infrequent phone calls was something close to pity, and she assumed her darkness made them feel darker. Her light had been long gone, and now she just made everything worse for everyone.

Helen didn’t think of Tyler’s family either. They kept in touch through her PO Box in town, cards arriving on holidays and letters at random intervals. The sentences were always full of friendliness, but she felt the deep sorrow in every word. They were only doing it out of a sense of duty.

None of her old friends flashed in her mind either. She hadn’t seen them in so long that it seemed like a different woman in a different life had maintained those friendships. The woman she was, here and now, had no real friends.

Somehow, she didn’t even consider Wade. The truth was, she simply forgot about him. Later, it would be impossible for her to say how it didn’t occur to her that Wade would have been the one to find her body in the cellar. It would have been devastating for him. She would have inflicted the worst kind of trauma upon someone she cared for.

No, it wasn’t the living ones who stopped her from pulling the trigger.

It was the notion in her head that maybe pulling the trigger would disappoint Tyler. And when she had that thought, she couldn’t go through with it, and she lowered the gun.

But stopping filled her with a tempest of anger.

She ran back up the stairs and raced outside into the gathering wind, and she screamed Tyler’s name as loud as she could. She wasn’t calling out to him for help anymore though. She was trying to crack open the universe.

Helen pointed the gun at the sky and fired.

The sound and the recoil jolted her, but it was the first thing that day that felt almost good.

She aimed high again and fired another bullet. If Tyler was her guardian angel, maybe one of her bullets would go whizzing past him. Wake him up and make him think twice about not giving her a direct sign.

Helen felt an ominous vibration in the air, unlike anything she’d ever felt, like thunder so far away she couldn’t hear it but could somehow still sense it.

Later, she’d look back and realize it wasn’t thunder.

It was a warning.

It was her last chance to close the door she was forcing open.

She pointed the gun at the sky again. If she couldn’t have Tyler, she wanted to break apart the sky and bleed this realm into the next.

She fired the gun a third time and almost instantly heard a strange sound—was it an impact? A scream? Or were those things in her head? She didn’t know exactly what she’d heard, but she knew something terrible had happened with the third shot.

Helen was well read, so she was aware that fateful things often happen according to the rule of three. In mythology, the Cosmos is divided into three equal parts: the Sky, the Sea, and the Underworld. In the Bible, there is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In supernatural parlor games, you peer into a mirror in a blackened room and say Bloody Mary exactly three times. It’s always three.

So in a way, she wasn’t surprised that it was her third gunshot that sent something hurtling toward earth. In a way, she was hoping, expecting, demanding. She didn’t realize what it was at first, but she saw the motion of it fall from the sky.

Instinctively, she ducked.

Chapter Six

Ten years, seven months, and eight days ago

Once upon a time, Helen met Tyler.

She had been working at the Seattle marketing firm for eight months, and one rainy March morning, she entered the lobby of the high-rise building downtown just as someone disappeared into the elevator. It was already a few minutes past eight o’clock, so as Helen closed her umbrella, she called out, “Please hold the elevator!”

A hand shot out to prevent the door from closing as she hurried across the lobby. She stepped into the elevator, and the young man said, “What floor?”

She said, “Seven,” at the same moment she saw his blue eyes. He pushed the button for floor seven and she saw that the floor-four button was already lit up. He gave her a small smile, one that would be best described as polite, but something glistened in his eyes that made her feel like she might have just stepped inside the opening pages of a story she needed to read. His sports jacket and dark-wash jeans effortlessly epitomized business casual, and she was glad she’d put on her favorite pencil skirt that morning. He had speckles of rain all over his face, and there was something so disarming about him that Helen couldn’t help but say, “You have rain on your face.”

He paused briefly, as if slightly surprised by her comment, and then said, “Yeah, I put that on this morning. Not a good look?”

“No, it’s good,” she said. “You could bottle it and sell it. Rain serum.”

“Rain serum?”

“Yeah, there’d be an amazing profit margin.”

He nodded slowly. “I like the way you think.” He didn’t wipe the rain from his face.

She tried not to laugh and watched him try not to laugh too, and it was that implicit, shared effort that made the air between them feel charged.

The man’s hair was a light sandy color, and from the way it was starting to curl near his ears, Helen could tell a natural wave was hiding in there. It was probably only days away from needing a trim, days away from turning wild, and she had the sudden inexplicable urge to put her hands in it.

The elevator dinged and stopped. Floor four. Their exchange had been so fast, and in a moment, he’d be gone. Except when the elevator doors opened, the man didn’t move.

“Is this your floor?” she asked.

He hesitated before saying, “Yeah.” He didn’t want to part ways either.

So she said, “It’s my floor too.” It no longer mattered to her that it was a few minutes past eight.

The man turned to her with a slow, cool smile, and then they stepped onto the fourth floor together. She had no idea what company even took up this floor, but the wall behind the receptionist said Coleman Geyer. Below the simple black block letters, an impressive abstract iron sculpture took up half the wall that indicated: We are corporate and solid but also innovative and creative!

“Are you newly employed here?” the man asked, playing along.

“No, I’m here to see . . . Daphne.”

“Ah, Daphne. I can take you to her.”

It all felt so easy that Helen suddenly didn’t trust any of it, but she still liked it nonetheless.

The man wiped the rain from his face and said, “Follow me,” and every sleeping thing inside of her came alive.

He led her through a maze of office cubicles as he pretended to search for Daphne. He moved with the grace of an athlete, tall and lean and easy. He said things like “Right, I guess this isn’t her desk anymore,” and “I forgot, she switched out of this team,” and Helen felt amazed by this man who played so easily. So much so, she started to feel breathless and nervous, because she hadn’t had this much fun since she’d graduated from college the previous June and she wanted to hold on to it, whatever it was.

They finally ended up alone in the staff kitchen, where he said, “I’m sorry. Daphne doesn’t seem to be here today, but can I interest you in some food from a refrigerator that hasn’t been cleaned in five years because it’s community property?”

He opened a refrigerator that was so crammed with brown paper bags and takeout food boxes that two of the bags plopped to the floor. It was even worse than the refrigerator on the seventh floor, and Helen started laughing much harder than the moment called for. Her oversized reaction made her feel transparent, and as her laughter died down, she felt the heat in her cheeks.

Quietly, she said, “Do you do this kind of thing often?”

“Do I often lead a woman whose name I don’t know around the entire floor of the company I work for while we pretend to look for someone that we both know doesn’t exist?” He shook his head. “Definitely not.”

“Helen.”

“Tyler.”

They didn’t shake hands because they were beyond shaking hands. Helen had the uneasy feeling that Tyler was a practiced flirt, and maybe he did funny and charming things like this all the time.

“How old are you?” Helen asked.

“Twenty-five,” Tyler said. “You?”

“Twenty-three.”

They were both still young enough that asking each other’s age was acceptable, even expected.

“Do you ride the elevator often?” she asked in a pretend-earnest tone.

“No, sometimes I take the stairs,” he said with equal earnestness. “You?”

“Everyone’s always trying to outdress each other on floor seven, so I’m usually in heels.” She made a face.

Tyler nodded sympathetically. The great unfairness of high heels. “Right. I don’t have that problem myself.”

“Usually I do like taking the stairs. Sometimes I even race up them.”

He smiled. “You mean you run up the stairs to get there faster, or you mean you try to beat the person you’re with to the top?”

“Both.”

“Ah, competitive.”

Helen shrugged and smiled, and Tyler laughed. “Why do I feel like you’re challenging me to a race?”

“I don’t know,” Helen said, in a tone that meant she did know.

“I’m a runner too.” The corners of Tyler’s mouth curved slightly.

Helen wanted to ask him his mile pace, because immediately the idea crystallized: We could be running partners! But goodness, she was getting ahead of herself, mapping out plans with some guy she’d just met. So instead she said, “Well, unfortunately, I probably should go to my desk and do some work.”

“Me too.”

Neither of them made any move to leave.

He asked, “What’s on the seventh floor?”

“Marketing. What’s on this floor?”

“A global communications agency that specializes in technology and information systems.”

“Wow.” She raised her eyebrows to emphasize just how wow it was.

“It’s nowhere near as important as it sounds.”

“It never is.”

He paused and then smiled, and she could see the hopeful expectation behind it. She inhaled.

He asked, “Will you go to dinner with me?”

“Yes.” She exhaled.

The next evening, Helen began the four-block walk from her apartment to an Italian restaurant. Tyler had suggested the place without knowing it was in her neighborhood, and she was trying not to think of it as a cosmic sign. She’d never been inside the restaurant, but she could tell from the pristine awning and the gleaming valet stand that it was nice. So nice, in fact, she’d tried not to grin too eagerly when he had suggested it. Yesterday, in Coleman Geyer’s fourth-floor kitchen, they’d exchanged phone numbers, and she’d said casually, “I’ll meet you there at six thirty.”

Then Helen had gone up to the seventh floor and stared at the letters and numbers on her computer screen as she replayed in her head every moment that she could recall with him. She did that for over an hour, until a coworker appeared and reminded her about the meeting in the boardroom. So Helen went into the boardroom with a notebook and fixed her face into a pretense of listening as she daydreamed herself back onto the fourth floor.

Now a block from the restaurant, Helen checked her phone. No calls or texts from Tyler. Since they’d met, they’d had no communication confirming the date, and a tiny part of her wondered if he’d even show. The previous morning had been so thrilling that it felt almost like a mirage.

The air was chilly tonight against her bare legs. She’d worn a little black dress and heels, which wasn’t completely fitting for the season, but she’d wanted to feel subtly sexy, and this dress made her feel exactly that way. Her tailored wool peacoat was over the top of it.

She straightened up as she approached the door to the restaurant. If Tyler wasn’t there or if he turned out to be a disappointment upon further conversation, it would be fine.

But when she entered, he was standing there waiting for her, and his eyes were so warm that she felt herself soften immediately. He was in dark indigo jeans with a gray dress shirt and a casual fitted brown blazer. The contrasting colors somehow worked perfectly, as if he’d just thrown them together, but she hoped he’d debated his wardrobe choices as long as she had. The inviting heat inside the lobby enveloped her, so she undid the button at the center of her coat that held it closed and noticed as he quickly took in her dress.

They shared a hello hug, and he said “You look pretty” as they pulled apart, and her body hummed at the compliment. Plenty of men had complimented Helen on her looks before, but plenty of men didn’t make her feel like this.

A hostess seated them at a reserved window table with a black tablecloth and a view of Lake Washington. The last date Helen had been on, two months earlier, the guy had taken her to a teriyaki place with paper folded napkins in upright metal casings on each laminate round table.

Here, the setting sun off the lake gave the water a slightly pink glow that made the space feel magical, but she told herself it wasn’t magic. It was weather and atmosphere, that was all. As Helen and Tyler read the menus and discussed the options, she tried to ignore how intensely attracted she was to him.

Because she was feeling so out of sorts, when she placed her pasta order she said, “Hold the olives,” but she didn’t realize her mistake until the server was already taking Tyler’s order. Helen loved olives. She’d meant to say, “Hold the onions.”

When the server turned to leave, Helen said, “Actually, I would like the olives on mine. But can you please hold the onions instead?”

Helen smiled at Tyler after the server left, and she said, “I’m not normally indecisive about olives.”

Tyler shrugged. “Olives can be perplexing.”

“They can. They come in both black and green.”

“And purple and brown.”

Helen laughed. “You really know your olives.”

His eyes glinted with quiet amusement. “I’m full of mundane trivia.”

Talking about olives shouldn’t have felt as fun as this did, and that’s when Helen thought, I’m in trouble.

Helen and Tyler didn’t just talk about olives that night. They talked about their childhoods and their favorite movies and how they didn’t understand why the provided dumpsters at their respective apartments were always full, even on the day after garbage pickup.

Helen was happy to find out Tyler’s mile pace wasn’t that much faster than hers and that he was sporty and liked the outdoors. Growing up, she’d played many sports herself, admittedly sometimes changing interests too often as she switched from the field to the gym and back into the dance studio, but she’d been a kid who always wanted to be doing something. And now she wanted to date someone who would go on a hike with her, not just play video games for hours on end like her last boyfriend.

When they talked about jobs, Helen admitted that she was feeling unsure about hers. When she’d been hired at the marketing firm, she’d held some kind of enchanted idea that it would be days of creative writing and exciting campaigns, promoting people and things she would feel passionate about. She’d graduated from college this past June with an ironclad plan: Be brave! Be bold! Become someone special! But she’d spent the better part of the last year hitting snooze on her alarm two to three times each morning as she faced another day of copywriting and graphic design for clients’ products that half the time she secretly thought were garbage.

Tyler asked, “Are you plotting your escape?”

“My escape?” she repeated. “From my job?”

“Yeah. If you hate your job, you should find something you like better.”

Helen blinked. She’d never considered leaving. “Don’t you hate your job?”

“No. It’s pretty good. A lot of it’s programming. It’s like working on a puzzle, and my boss is cool too.”

“Well, that sounds very un-American of you,” she said, and they both laughed for the millionth time. And then she added, “But I’m glad for you.”

By the time their plates were cleared and they were sipping chocolate martinis, her body was pulsing with how badly she wanted to sleep with Tyler. She’d never slept with anyone after only one date, and she didn’t want to lose her mind over someone she’d just met.

Except after talking to him for almost three hours straight, she felt like she’d been waiting to know this man her entire life. Throughout dinner, she’d laughed so much that the corners of her mouth ached a little. It wasn’t his quick wit that had destroyed all of her defenses though. It was the way he listened to her and asked her questions like she was the most fascinating woman in the city. She thought, He is really good at this, and even as she recognized that it might be a well-honed seduction tactic—perhaps Tyler was an expert at unwrapping women—she was still captivated by it.

When Tyler took a sip of his cocktail and asked Helen if she would rather be a lion or a housecat, she asked, “Am I a lion in the wild or one in captivity?”

“Wild.”

“Hmm, okay.” The vodka tingled in her chest. “What kind of a life do I have as a housecat? Am I completely housebound or can I go out at night and get into mischief?”

“You’d find a way out.” He leaned forward, as if he were telling her a secret. “There’d be a hidden crawlspace in the attic that would lead to the outside.”

She leaned forward too. “What’s the lifespan of a lion?”

“Not sure. Let’s say it’s similar to a cat.”

She took the final sip of her drink and said, “As the housecat, who’s my owner?”

“I’m your owner.”

Helen narrowed her eyes. “You’re my owner? Was this game just a ploy to tell me about your preferences?” The way she said “preferences” insinuated a lot.

Tyler sat back and his cheeks turned pink. He shook his head and looked down at the table as he laughed. This time, Helen didn’t laugh with him. She just watched how cute and boyish he was in the moment.

When his laughter faded and he looked back up at her, she whispered, “Definitely the housecat.”

“Oh.” He smiled, but then the server arrived with the check and saved him from needing to come up with a better response.

As Helen and Tyler exited the restaurant, they were talking and laughing about something as they turned toward each other. She could feel the happy flush in her face, and she loved the way his eyes sparkled when they met hers. They both went still, and there was a breath suspended in time before their lips found each other. It was impossible to say who moved first. It was a magnetic pull more than a choice or action. It was just the truth of what was always going to happen between them, and she thought, Here comes the fall.

There on the sidewalk, with strangers passing by, Helen and Tyler kissed for the first time. Their lips started soft and sweet and then set into an entrancing rhythm, and she felt herself fill up with a million glowing stars. And then she was laughing again, because they were making out on the city sidewalk.

When they stepped apart, she reached for his hand and softly asked, “Do you want to come to my apartment?”

Tyler didn’t say anything, just nodded and looked at her a little like he was in awe, and she thought, Please let that look on his face be real.

Four blocks later, Helen unlocked the front door to her building, and they started kissing halfway up the stairwell. One of the ceiling lights was burned out—the management was never on top of things—and the dark haze made it feel that much more electrifying, forbidden even. Helen pushed Tyler against the wall, and his hands moved inside her wool coat and gripped her waist through the thin cotton of her dress. She pressed the length of her body against his and then stepped back.

“We’re not actually in my apartment yet,” Helen said.

“Oh?” Tyler said, feigning confusion.

“This is just the stairwell.”

“Ohhh, okay. I was thinking, wow, her apartment is huge.”

Helen burst out laughing, and so did he, and then she heard someone’s door open on the second floor. She took Tyler’s hand in hers, leading him up the stairs, and past her second-floor neighbor, a middle-aged man who always seemed to be coming and going with a beat-up brown briefcase. She nodded hello as they passed by the neighbor, and she felt as though a sign were hanging around her neck that announced her sexual intentions.

Once Helen and Tyler were inside her studio apartment, he took off his jacket and draped it over a chair. That was the chair she ate breakfast on every morning, grumpy while she waited for her coffee to kick in. Now that they were no longer in the dark stairwell, broken lights coaxing her to be bold, things felt very real. She wanted the frenzied passion back, but he was staring at the leatherbound collection on the bookshelves in the entry.

“You have an entire collection of encyclopedias.”

“I do.”

“How very nineties of you.”

“They are from the nineties,” she said. “My mom wanted to donate them because, you know, the internet…”

Tyler smiled.

“But I couldn’t let her do that. I used to spend hours reading them as a kid.”

“You spent hours reading encyclopedias as a kid?”

“Yeah.”

Helen thought he was going to make a joke, but instead he said, “That’s really cool.”

Then he moved farther into the studio and said, “I like that,” as he took in the piece of art hanging above her couch, an eerie painting of a woman with multicolored smoke swirling around her face. Helen’s walls were covered in weird art, inexpensive pieces she’d found in vintage stores and junk shops around the city. She removed her coat and put it on the chair next to his, then stepped up beside him and crossed her arms, as if they were taking it in, side by side at the Seattle Art Museum.

“Yes, yes,” she said in her most pretentious voice. “The artist really captured the many shades and nuances of life with her use of color.”

As Helen continued to stare at the piece with an expression that she hoped appeared pensive, Tyler stole a sideways look at her. She squinted at the art to show him this playfulness was serious business.

But then she couldn’t help herself. She inhaled deeply, followed by an exhalation that sounded so much louder than she intended. That breath held all her desire and her nervousness and her want, and Tyler heard it loud and clear.

One moment they were standing there as pretend patrons of the art community, and the next he was grabbing her so fast that she was squealing as she wrapped her arms around his neck, swept into how natural it felt to touch him, to be held by him.

In between kisses, Helen asked, “Is this too cliché?”

“What?”

“Sex on the first date.”

Tyler raised his eyebrows. “We’re going to have sex?”

She smacked him on the arm.

He laughed. “No, sex on the third date would be way more cliché.”

“So we’re really just being rebels.”

“Right,” he agreed and bit her bottom lip softly. “We’re rebels.”

And she melted right then and there. Somehow on the way to her bed, she ended up pulling them against her closet doors, and the wood groaned on its hinges. Then she felt him reaching for the hem of her dress. When he paused, she said, “Take it off,” and she put her hands in the air. She felt his fingertips against her bare skin as he pulled the dress over her head.

Helen reached for the top button on Tyler’s shirt and started working her way down. “Why did you wear a shirt with so many buttons?” she asked.

“To torture you.”

“So mean.” She dropped his shirt to the floor and stepped back to admire him. She was still wearing heels on her feet, and a matching black lace bra and panty set, and it made her feel like a pinup girl as his eyes took her in.

“You look so amazing,” he said. “Absolutely amazing.” He said it as if it was a statement of fact that she shouldn’t try to refute because he was unquestionably correct.

Helen put her hands on his chest and trailed her fingers across his skin as she said, “So do you,” then shoved him backward onto the bed. She stepped out of her heels and climbed on top, sitting astride him. Tyler sat up to kiss her, and as she lowered all her weight onto her knees, she felt the heat of him against her.

His hands trailed from the skin of her bare waist down, and he said, “Your legs are cold.”

“Because I walked four blocks in the cold with bare legs.”

“It’s March,” he said in between kisses. “That’s crazy.”

“It was for you!” she said against his mouth. “I wanted you to see my legs when I walked into the restaurant.”

Tyler chuckled and tilted his head back so he could see her face. “I definitely saw your legs when you walked into the restaurant. And I saw your legs in the elevator yesterday morning too.”

“You never looked at my legs in the elevator.”

“I did.” He smiled. “I was very quick and very stealthy.”

Then they divested each other of the rest of their clothes, and he looked at not just her legs but all of her, this time not so quick and not so stealthy.

Eventually, Tyler said, “I have a condom in my jacket,” and he looked all the way over to the chair where he had left his jacket. And Helen said, “I have a condom in my dresser,” and she looked at the drawer right next to her bed. And Tyler said, “You win.”

After that, the whole world faded away. It was hands in hair and urgent kissing, and it was their eyes poring over each other.

When they flipped over so Helen was beneath him, she accidentally caught her elbow in his ribs and said, “Sorry,” and he quickly whispered, “It’s okay.”

And then Tyler showed her how it was better than okay with the way he gripped her hips and slid inside her.

“I like that sound you’re making,” he said, and she hadn’t even realized she was making a sound.

Usually the first time Helen had sex with someone new, she pretended to come because she was too hyperaware of herself to let go. The second time, the third time, she would have no problem finding release, but the first time felt like performance art. She always viewed her body through the man’s eyes, as if she were outside herself. So she was surprised when she felt the sensations between her legs growing and then growing even more. So much of it was the way Tyler was looking at her, holding her in such an intense gaze that she had a hard time staying stuck inside her brain. His gaze tethered her heart to his and made her fall in small increments. She became vaguely aware of the noises she was making again, and he must have seen how she was responding because he maintained the same rhythm, just moved into her a little deeper, and then she came. No performance art. A real wave that crashed over her so hard that she buried her face in his shoulder so he wouldn’t be able to fully see and hear how much it affected her.

When Helen opened her eyes and lay her head back, Tyler was looking down at her. Their eyes locked together and he tipped over the edge. He, too, buried his face in her shoulder and muffled his sounds there. The way they were hiding from each other accentuated to her how new all of this was.

Afterward, she rested her head on his chest and listened to how fast his heart was beating.

Later that night, when Tyler kissed his way down her stomach, Helen put her hands in his hair and warned him that oral sex wasn’t really her thing. He paused and peered up at her. “What do you mean?”

Her past boyfriends had been impatient or uninterested or both, and so the whole act made her feel self-conscious. She told him, “I don’t mind it. I’m just not sure I’m that into it, I guess.”

He just smiled at her and resumed kissing his way southbound. Then he showed her how wrong she was.

The next morning, their third time, was perfect.

Because by that time, she was completely lost to him.

When Tyler left Helen’s apartment the next morning, he said, “I’ll call you later today.”

She nodded and smiled. There was no doubt in her mind that she would hear from him.

But her phone never rang.

Chapter Seven

Present day

The dark thing that fell from the sky landed twenty feet away from Helen.

When it hit the earth, she felt vibrations from the crash, not only beneath her feet, but also as pressure in her head that traveled down her spine. That made it all the more shocking when she saw how small it was. Its impact shouldn’t have been so substantial.

She walked slowly toward the black form. It was a raven. She had accidentally shot a bird out of the sky. She closed her eyes.

Sometimes Helen saw ravens in the forest and around the farmhouse. While crows traveled in large groups—a murder—ravens were often alone. They were larger than crows, and instead of flapping, they soared when they flew. Crows cawed, but ravens screamed. This raven wouldn’t be soaring or screaming anymore though. It was dead.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly.

Helen finished piling dirt on the tiny, freshly dug grave. She’d placed it about two dozen feet from her garden, so she’d be able to see it while she worked on her vegetables. She planned to make a grave marker for it later out of cedar twigs.

She ran her hand across the fresh dirt on top, then picked up the Edgar Allan Poe book from the ground next to her and opened it to the page she’d folded down: the poem “The Raven.”

Helen began to read it aloud as a eulogy.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered . . .

She continued reading the poem with clear enunciation and soft emphasis. When she reached the last lines, she took a deep breath first, to ensure she said the words in her best rhythm with her best timbre.

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

Shall be lifted—nevermore!

Helen closed the book.

She wasn’t going to tell Wade about the raven, because then he’d ask her why they weren’t eating it for dinner.

In the kitchen, Helen hesitated. She needed to finish the stew, but she also needed to get Wade’s lunches ready for the rest of the week. She usually would have done that yesterday, Sunday, but yesterday had gotten away from her with the cleaning and the sweeping and the moments when she paused just to keep herself from screaming. And now today was slipping out of her reach too, all because she had unleashed those bottled-up screams.

Helen grabbed the stack of brown paper lunch bags from the cupboard. With a pencil, she wrote each day of the week on the front of the bags.

Tuesday.

Wednesday.

Thursday.

Friday.

Saturday. Sometimes Wade worked on Saturdays too.

She needed to prepare homemade bread for his sandwiches. Each night, she would also add fresh vegetables or fruit to the bag for the next day. And each morning, Wade would take a bag with him when he left to work the trees.

But no, there wasn’t time to work on the lunches now. She set aside the bags and opened the refrigerator to get the carrots she’d already peeled. She dumped them on a wooden cutting board, then was startled by the sound of an urgent knock on the door.

She froze. Suddenly there came a tapping.

More loud knocking. “Helen?”

Everything in her body relaxed. She knew that voice. Agnes had finally come!

Helen rushed across the kitchen. She didn’t want to embarrass herself by acting completely overjoyed with Agnes’s arrival, so she opened the door and said, “No need to break down the door,” but she smiled when she said it, and Agnes could tell she was overjoyed nonetheless and matched Helen’s smile.

“I’m parched!” Agnes said.

Agnes was dressed in orange hiking gear. Yanking the earbuds from her ears, she headed directly to the kitchen sink to refill her water bottles. There was one in her hand, one snapped to her waist, and one sticking out of the side pocket of her small backpack.

“I was starting to wonder about you,” Helen said. “It’s been almost a month.”

It had been so long that she had even considered hiking to Agnes’s house, something she’d never done. The round trip, plus the visit, would take up most of the day. And even though Helen and Tyler used to hike for fun, she didn’t have that kind of desire anymore. The most she did was wander the woods to clear her mind.

Agnes brought the water bottle to her lips, then paused. “My parents. Well, my dad. He’s making me do all kinds of stuff around the house—even putting new shingles on the roof with him. Says as long as I’m still under his roof, I have to help make sure we still have a roof.” Agnes was a fast talker, and she got out all her words in one breath before she took a big gulp of water.

“The Farmer’s Almanac is predicting a rainy winter,” Helen said.

Agnes laughed, and Helen shrugged. She didn’t know if she believed it either.

“My dad thinks he is the Farmer’s Almanac.” Agnes was twenty, and she seemed like both a young twenty and an old twenty, still caught between youth and adulthood—innocent and inexperienced in so many ways, yet tough and resourceful in other ways. “Is your husband here?” Agnes asked.

“No.” Wade was always out working when Agnes came by.

Agnes picked up a carrot from the cutting board and bit off the tip. “It only took me two hours to get here.”

“Two hours? That’s fast.”

“I ran part of it.” Agnes crunched on the carrot like she hadn’t eaten in days. “Mind if I have this?”

“Do you need something more?”

Agnes waved her hand to indicate no. “I got protein bars on me.”

Good. Helen really didn’t feel like making Agnes food. “I should warn you,” Helen said, crossing the room to the side table and opening the little drawer in it. “The list is long this time.”

At the top of the page, Helen had scrawled the words Things to Talk with Agnes About. Beneath that was a list.

Agnes watched as Helen read from the wrinkled, handwritten piece of paper.

Scanning the topics, Helen said, “Okay, so here are the riveting options: I fell in the shed and still have a monster bruise from it . . . Wade made some comments about the way I cook oatmeal . . .”

Agnes said, “I want to hear that first.”

“If we walk down to the pond, there’s a beaver den . . .”

“Sorry, I can’t stay long enough to hit the pond.”

Helen stopped reading. Agnes had just arrived and already she was talking about leaving. The energy in the room shifted.

Agnes said, “My dad wants me home by four. Roofing calls.”

“Oh.” That was all Helen could think to say.

“I’ll be back soon, okay?” Agnes looked apologetic.

“Of course.”

“I just wanted to stop in real quick. Check on you.”

Helen nodded. There was a reason the list was so creased and crumpled. On her loneliest days, she took the paper out and carried it around with her, read it to herself between chores, and pondered the things she might say. Those lead scribbles were a promise of future conversations that she was always waiting to have.

Helen folded the paper in half. She’d have to wait a little longer.

Agnes finished the last bite of her carrot. As she tossed the stem end into the compost bin under the sink, she said, “I have some things to add to the list.”

“Oh?” Helen brightened up and grabbed a pencil from inside the drawer.

“Last time, you told me about that history class.”

“On the Klondike Gold Rush?”

“Yeah! So wild. I had more questions.”

Helen unfolded the paper and wrote gold rush. “Are you thinking about heading to Alaska with a pan?”

“No!” Agnes said quickly, but not before her eyes flashed with curiosity. “Why? Do you think there’s still gold?”

“Not that you can get from the river with a pan.”

“Damn. I guess I’m stuck roofing until further notice.” Agnes sighed dramatically and then laughed. “And I need to ask you about concerts. I’ve never been, you know. I don’t count some old guys with their guitars at the grange. I was thinking maybe I’d go to one in Seattle. Maybe you’d want to go too.”

“It might be hard for me to get away,” Helen said, and she instantly felt regret. She didn’t want to hurt Agnes’s feelings, but she just couldn’t imagine herself at a concert anymore, and certainly not one in Seattle.

Agnes tried to cover her disappointment with a shrug. “Yeah, I get it. Maybe you could tell me which places to go.”

“Sure, I know all the best places,” Helen said as she added the topic to the list. Then she peered at Agnes for a beat. “This isn’t on the list, but I buried a raven by my garden. Do you want to see it before you go?”

Agnes scrunched her face. “A dead raven? Definitely.”

The two women stood in front of the little grave. Helen didn’t want to tell Agnes she had accidentally shot the bird, so she lied and said she found it by the garden.

Agnes asked, “Why didn’t you just toss it in the woods?”

“I didn’t want the coyotes to eat it.”

“They would have loved it. That’s like happy hour for them.”

“Yeah, well, Wade would have eaten it on bruschetta himself.”

Agnes looked at Helen sharply. “What? You can’t eat raven. They carry disease and shit.”

“All animals can carry disease and shit. If the meat is still fresh, and you clean and cook it properly, ravens are as safe to eat as some pig or chicken that’s been crammed into a commercial breeding barn. I mean, probably.”

“Probably? You don’t even know how long it’d been dead.”

“I do. I saw it die.”

Agnes cringed. “What do you mean? You just came out here and it was lying on the ground, like twitching?”

“Yeah. It was almost dead. I don’t know what happened to it.”

“Very creepy.”

Helen smiled softly at her young friend. A dead bird was nothing compared to a masked man with a knife, and Helen wondered, not for the first time, how Agnes would respond if she knew about Tyler’s murder. Agnes didn’t even know that before Wade there had been Tyler. She just knew that Helen’s heart had been broken by another man in Seattle. The first time Agnes had shown up at the farmhouse, Helen had wanted to make a friend who wouldn’t view her as a tragic widow, so she’d told a fuzzy variation of the truth, and then she’d never corrected the record. There was something nice about just talking about everything and anything other than the one thing she couldn’t stop thinking about.

Agnes wrinkled her nose. “Helen, seriously, you can’t just go around eating twitchy birds.”

“I have no desire to eat a raven.” Helen gestured at the grave. “Hence the burial. I’m just saying Wade feels we’re living the life of survivalists and should eat from the land.”

“Got it,” Agnes said slowly as she studied Helen. “So what was the jerky you gave me to eat last time I was here?”

Helen waved her hand dismissively. “Don’t worry. That was just crow.” She kept a straight face and watched Agnes process her words.

“Crow? Seriously?” Agnes looked a little sick.

Helen waited a moment before she grinned. “No, not seriously. It was deer.”

Agnes burst out laughing. It was such a nice, boundless sound, and Helen wanted to laugh along with her. Laughing with someone was like sharing your heart with them. Helen felt her body loosen, and she thought she would begin to laugh too except it didn’t happen, not in the way it should have. Instead it stalled in her throat, and the sound she forced out was like a bad actor laughing in a bad movie. She went quiet, afraid Agnes would think she was being disingenuous.

It seemed Helen’s body no longer remembered how to laugh.

Chapter Eight

After Agnes left, Helen went back inside to work on the stew, the shadows of earlier pushed back a bit by the warmth of her friend’s visit.

As she sliced vegetables, first the carrots, then potatoes and winter squash, she tried to fill her head with happy thoughts of living in the forest with Wade. Two months ago, after dark, they had moved the rocking chairs from the front porch down to the yard so they could gaze at the Perseids meteor shower. It was her second year seeing it from the clear skies of this remote land, and it didn’t amaze her any less than the first time. Growing up in Seattle under the city lights, she’d barely been able to even see stars, let alone the trails of gold shooting across the galaxy.

Everything wasn’t bad out here.

She could do this.

After a while, she heard the rumble of Wade’s old Ford pickup truck. The sun was still above the trees, so Helen was surprised he was back already.

She went to the front door and opened it, leaned against the doorframe, and watched him climb out of the truck in his dirty work clothes. Even when Wade looked tired, as he did now, he still looked so solid. Not long after they met, Helen had taken him to Gas Works Park in Seattle. She’d been there several times before, but Wade had moved from his farm in central Oregon only a month earlier, and there were so many things he didn’t know about the city. While he’d marveled at the rust red remains and the gray towers of the former coal gasification plant, she had marveled at the size of his shoulders, and it was the first time since Tyler’s murder she’d felt anything close to safety. Every now and then, she still felt like that woman in Gas Works Park when she looked at him.

At the farmhouse’s front door, Wade greeted her with a little kiss, careful not to get her dirty.

Helen asked, “How was everything today?”

“I finished marking the trees.”

“Good. I’ll run you a bath.”

“Actually, no,” he said. “I need to head into town. I missed out on a good deer today. There’s some kind of issue with my firing pin.”

Wade kept a rifle on the mounted rack in his truck, and sometimes when he was working in the trees, he lucked out and got a deer or elk or wild turkey.

Helen’s eyebrows rose. “You’re going to town?”

“Yeah. I’ll drop the rifle off at the gun shop and pick up a part for the truck. It’ll take me a couple hours.”

“Maybe I should go with you.” She wouldn’t say a word about pizza this time. She would stay quiet, roll down the truck window, and look out at the storefronts. She’d simply make eye contact with people on the street, and if she saw a dog, she’d pet it. That’s all. Then she’d use the phone in the corner market to call her mother, and she’d buy herself a small box of strawberries, because they were her favorite fruit and her crop was done for the season.

Wade asked, “Is that stew you were making ready?”

“Not yet. I got a little sidetracked . . .”

“With what?”

Tyler and a revolver and a raven and a poem and Agnes. “Just chores.”

“I’ll be starving by the time I get back.”

Helen swallowed her disappointment and nodded.

“Great,” Wade said. “I just need to grab a few things from the shed.”

He started across the yard. He was halfway to the shed when Helen spoke again. “I hate cooking.”

Wade stopped and turned back. “What?”

Helen said, “What?”

He looked at her strangely, and she could tell that his What hadn’t been a challenge. He really hadn’t heard her. “What did you say?” he repeated.

“Nothing. Just . . . I hate the shed.”

“Yeah, I need to organize it.”

Wade disappeared into the shed. She stayed there, leaning against the doorframe, arms folded across her chest, as he clanged and banged around for a couple of minutes. It seemed ironic that he was the one going into town alone these days while she stayed behind. He wasn’t antisocial exactly, but he didn’t crave interactions with people the way she used to in her past life. He was content as a loner, and from the little bits he’d been willing to share about his life in Oregon, she’d come to understand that he’d been frustrated when the ma and pop stores on main street started closing and the housing developments started creeping onto the surrounding farmland. The shuttering of the local feed store had been the final blow. The closest big box store had told Wade to place orders on their app, but he’d only had a flip phone and no interest in upgrading to a smartphone. Helen wondered, if they hadn’t met in Seattle, would this plan have ever come to fruition? Would he have done it alone, or had it required the perfect storm of two restless souls? One soul weary of the modern world and one soul aching for an escape and willing to try almost anything as long as it was different.

When Wade emerged again from the shed, he looked surprised to find Helen still there at the door, just staring. He held up a tool as if it was some kind of explanation.

“Be back soon!” he said as he climbed into his truck.

She stayed in the doorway until the truck rounded the bend in the dirt driveway. Then she returned to the kitchen and stared at her pile of partially chopped vegetables.

Every once in a while there were meteor showers, but most days there were just potatoes.

Chapter Nine

Ten years, seven months, and three days ago

It had been five days since Helen and Tyler’s date. Five days since she’d taken him into her bed. Five days of silence from him.

Last night, she’d fallen asleep crying. This morning, she’d woken up and thought, I need to sell this mattress and get a new one. Then she told herself to stop being so dramatic. Her mattress was just a mattress, not a temple to some man who hadn’t called her. People had one-night stands all the time. She’d simply joined a popular club. It was nothing. He was nothing. She was nothing. And it was time to get ready for a nothing day at her nothing job.

So Helen put on her makeup and put on her clothes and put on an attitude of I’m fine, and she left her apartment without eating breakfast because the ache in her throat made it hard to swallow.

She was about to start up the concrete stairs to her office building when she saw him through the glass of the front doors into the lobby. He was at the elevator bay, standing nice and straight as if the world hadn’t tilted on its axis for him the way it had for her. He was wearing charcoal fitted trousers and a black leather bomber jacket that was nice enough for work but edgy enough that she couldn’t breathe. He didn’t look like someone who’d been up all night crying.

She froze on the steps.

Tyler turned his head and looked right at her.

Or so it seemed. With the sunlight reflecting on the glass, it was possible he couldn’t clearly see outside.

At least that’s what Helen told herself as she spun away and walked down the sidewalk, pausing in front of the neighboring building, out of his sight now. She had taken off so quickly, in motion before her mind had a chance to tell herself how stupid it would look if he could indeed see her flee.

It couldn’t be much warmer than fifty degrees outside, but her skin prickled with nervous heat. She removed her coat and let at least two minutes pass. Tyler had to be in the elevator by now. If for some reason, she saw him later and he said he’d seen her, she’d say she had spotted a coworker and went back to greet them. She’d lie and say she hadn’t even noticed him through the doors.

But they’d looked right at each other.

No, not really though. Through glass across the expanse of a lobby didn’t really count, did it?

She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders.

As Helen ascended the concrete stairs once again, the lobby came into view and there was Tyler, in the same spot, staring out at the street. Her heart tripped.

As she entered the building, she kept her coat folded over her arm and clutched her bag in front of her. She was glad she’d chosen a red blouse that morning. Red projected confidence!

Helen smiled brightly. “Hello!”

“Hey,” Tyler said, not as brightly but still politely. He was studying her face closely.

“How are you?” she asked. This was going well.

“Fine. Why’d you run away?” This was not going well at all.

She laughed. “Run away?” She took one moment to pretend she didn’t understand and then another moment to pretend she was slowly comprehending his comment. “Oh. I saw a friend outside. Had to say hello.”

“Okay.” He didn’t believe her.

He reached out to touch the elevator call button on the wall. When Helen had seen him through the glass doors, he’d clearly already been waiting for the elevator, which meant he’d let an elevator come and go. He’d waited for her.

“It’s nice outside today,” Helen said. “Warm.” God, the weather?

“Yeah,” Tyler agreed in an even voice. “The weatherman said partly cloudy with a high of sixty-one and a low of forty-four.”

She looked at him sharply, but he was staring at the closed elevator doors. Was he being serious or sarcastic? What the hell did he mean, reciting the forecast like that?

Helen cleared her throat. “We’ve been lucky to not have rain lately.”

Ding! The elevator opened.

They stepped inside. He pressed the buttons for floors four and seven, and the doors closed heavily. The silence enveloped them as she felt the weightless rise to floor two, then three.

Finally, Tyler turned to her. “Do you want to grab lunch together?” His voice was normal now, his eyes warm . . . maybe even hopeful? No trace of formality. No weather forecasting. Just a genuine invitation.

“Oh.” Helen was surprised. This was not what she expected. “I have a lunch meeting today. I can’t.” It was true. A client was coming at noon.

As the elevator stopped at floor four, he nodded and said, “Have a good day, Helen.” His tone was polite again.

Tyler stepped off the elevator.

As the doors closed, she wished she could reach out and grab the back of his leather jacket, but the moment had come and gone so quickly.

Helen had a difficult time focusing on the conversation with the client during lunch. This was nothing new though. It wasn’t unusual for her to be sitting in a meeting talking with enthusiasm about how to increase sales for some piece of tech junk that nobody really needed in their lives, all the while thinking, What’s the point of all this anyway? To sell more useless stuff to consumers? Sometimes, when she heard herself say words like authenticity and synergy and brand identity, she wanted to dump her caramel macchiato on her own face. Nothing about this corporate world felt authentic, but today was more excruciating than usual, because her mind kept drifting back to Tyler. Luckily, the two other members from her team were there to carry most of the chatter. Helen pushed her chicken Cobb salad around on her plate and chimed in with appropriate responses occasionally.

Tyler still wanted her. Helen had no doubt. She’d felt it in the awkward silence between them in the elevator, and she’d seen it on his face when she’d turned down his lunch invitation. Mostly, though, she’d just sensed it in the way that a woman just knows.

But wanting someone and respecting someone were two different things. She wasn’t about to date someone who would fail to keep his word. Friday morning, he’d told her he’d call her that day. It was Wednesday now. That was unacceptable. And if they hadn’t happened to run into each other by the elevator this morning, then what? There probably wouldn’t have been a lunch invitation. Clearly, Tyler was a man of convenience, someone who took things that were in front of him when it was easy but not when it required effort.

And yet, she needed to see him. Even though all she was probably going to do was tell him that he’d blown it with her. Still, she’d rather speak her mind now and be done with the whole torrid affair than spend the rest of her days avoiding him in the lobby.

Two hours later, Helen entered Coleman Geyer with a manila envelope in her hand. She smiled at the receptionist and lifted the envelope. “Just dropping this off with someone,” Helen said without pausing in her stride.

The receptionist nodded and her eyes returned to the desk computer. You could go almost anywhere if you acted like you belonged.

Helen had no idea where Tyler’s desk was, so she walked down the halls briskly, clutching the envelope. Any time an employee noticed her, she nodded in a way that invited no inquiry. I’m here on business! See, I have an envelope!

Finally, she came upon Tyler’s desk. His back was to her, and he held the phone to his ear. An inner cubicle, not the most private place to have this conversation. There were two people at nearby cubicles within earshot.

Helen stopped at the edge of the half wall that delineated Tyler’s cubicle from the one next to it. He sensed her presence and spun his desk chair slightly to see who it was. His lips parted faintly in surprise.

She smiled nervously, though she hoped it looked cool and casual as she leaned against the half wall. He continued listening to the person on the other end of the line, never taking his eyes off Helen. She glanced around as if admiring the office space: Nice place here—the generic wall art, the fake plants, the garish overhead lighting, love it!

It felt like an eternity of waiting, though it was probably less than a minute before she heard Tyler say, “Hey, can I call you back in a bit?”

As he hung up, she turned back to him. His hands were clasped in his lap, the body language of someone patiently waiting for the other person to speak first. The sleeves of his button-down shirt were folded partly up his forearms, and she swallowed. She knew what the skin there felt like.

Helen said, “I need to see Daphne.”

In the elevator ride down from floor seven, she had come up with that opener, thinking it would be clever, but it sounded stupid instead. Tyler didn’t laugh. He just looked at her for a long moment, then stood.

“Sure, follow me,” he said.

So she did, uncertain if this was going to be another game. That hadn’t been her intention, and she didn’t want to playact with him. But he didn’t attempt to say anything funny as he led her down the hall to a wooden door. He simply opened it and gestured for her to go ahead.

She stepped inside a large supply closet. It smelled like paper and, strangely, pencil lead. Who used pencils these days, other than architects maybe? Then Helen realized she was standing next to an old wall-mounted pencil sharpener, a relic of a past time. It looked like the type that had been at her elementary school, and loneliness swept over her. Growing up to be a woman hadn’t turned out to be as much fun as she’d imagined it would be as a little girl.

Tyler closed the door quietly behind them and regarded her with a neutral expression. “Okay. What’s up, Helen?”

“What’s up?” Helen repeated. This man had a lot of nerve.

“Is there a problem?”

“Yes.” She tossed the useless manila envelope on the shelf next to her. “You.”

A crease formed between his eyebrows. “Okay. What did I do?”

“Are you serious?”

His face softened a little. “Yes. I’m not a mind reader, so just tell me.” He rested his hand on her shoulder and it seemed like a spontaneous gesture, a sign that he was still comfortable with the idea of his body touching hers, and that incensed her even as she felt herself wanting to sway into the touch, not away.

“You didn’t call me or text or anything. It’s been almost a week.” She felt her face burning now. “I realize I could have called or texted you myself, except when you left my place on Friday morning, you said, and I quote, I’ll call you later today.”

Tyler removed his hand from her shoulder and stared at her for a long beat before he said, very slowly, “This is because I didn’t call you or text you?” Helen looked away, then back again. He smiled faintly as he asked, “And you’re upset about that?”

It was his little smile that made her snap. “Fuck you—yes, I’m upset. I thought we had a great time.”

Tyler made a slight face in reaction to her swearing at him, almost as if it wounded him, and she wished she could take that part back—not because he didn’t deserve it, but because it seemed undignified on her part, swearing like a truck driver. She didn’t care if he knew that he’d hurt her though. He had indeed hurt her, and if he could do something like this to her, he was probably doing this to lots of women. What was the point of acting indifferent when someone charmed you only to discard you? There was no shame in being hurt.

“You’re so mean.” Helen shook her head. “A woman tells you she’s upset, and you smile at her?”

Tyler’s entire expression changed then. “No, I’m sorry,” he said softly, bringing his hands to the outside of her arms. Gentle, reassuring. “Don’t be upset. I just thought it was a little funny because I did call you. And I texted you. You didn’t reply to my texts or call me back, so I thought you were the one ignoring me.”

“What?”

As Tyler pulled his phone out of his pocket and punched in the passcode, Helen could already feel the heaviness lifting.

He opened his text app and scrolled down to find a thread. He held it up so she could read it. Her name was at the top and the thread had two outgoing messages.

The first was date-stamped Friday at 6:10 p.m.:

Hey, I had a great time last night. Sorry I’m texting. I wanted to see you again this weekend, but my grandma had a heart attack. She’s in the hospital in Portland and I just got down here. Looks like she’s going to be okay, but I’m staying with my mom for a couple days. It’s a little crazy right now. I’ll call you when I get back to Seattle.

The second text was from Saturday morning at 11:44 a.m.:

How’s it going?

“And here’s my call log.” He turned the screen toward her again so she could see the list of phone calls. “Mom. Mom. My sister. Mom and . . . Helen.”

The outgoing call to her was Saturday afternoon.

“I didn’t wait to call until I got back to Seattle,” Tyler said. “I called you from Portland . . .” He trailed off. He didn’t need to explain why.

“That’s weird.” Helen felt hopeful but still very much on guard. She’d spent the last few days assuming the worst and couldn’t fully shake that feeling. “Did you leave me a voicemail?”

“Yeah.” He looked at her, then back down at his phone.

“Is your grandma okay?” she asked.

“Yeah, they let her go home yesterday . . .” He was doing something on his phone again. “Do you have one of those generic greetings?”

Helen shook her head. She had a personalized greeting on her voicemail.

After a moment, Tyler showed her his screen. It was her name and phone number in his address book.

She smiled. “You transposed the six and the three.”

He smiled too, his entire body suddenly so relaxed it made it starkly evident just how tense he’d been only moments prior. Helen realized then she didn’t need to be on guard. There was nothing manipulative about this man.

Tyler shook his head slowly. “I’m sorry, Helen. I can’t believe I messed that up.” He edited her phone number in his address book and showed her the screen again.

“That’s correct now,” Helen said, and Tyler started to laugh. “Why are you laughing?” She already knew the answer because she felt the same way, but she wanted to hear him say it.

“Because I’m relieved.”

“So you like me?” she asked.

He tucked his phone back in his pocket and his hands moved to her waist and squeezed playfully. “Just a little bit.”

She put her arms around his neck. “I ran away when I saw you waiting at the elevator this morning.”

He leaned down to whisper in her ear. “I know. That’s why I was still standing there when you came back.”

She rose up on her toes to whisper in his ear. “I know.” Helen could feel Tyler’s chest tremble against hers as he tried to hold in his laugh. “I felt so stupid though,” she said. “I didn’t know what to say. I was rambling about the weather.”

They both started to laugh at the shared memory, clutching each other’s arms as they recounted it.

“This morning was salt in my wounds,” Tyler said. “I said to myself, if she starts telling me how many miles per hour the wind is, I’m skipping work. I’m done for the day.”

Helen protested, “You were the one telling me the exact forecast.”

“I just made up a forecast because the whole thing was so awkward. For something to be that awkward, I thought, either she really likes me, or she really hates me. I was afraid it was the second.”

“No,” she said. “It’s the first.”

Tyler kissed her softly, and everything felt sweet again.

After work, they went to happy hour. As they were sitting down at a round bar table with drinks and a basket of soft pretzels with cheese dip, Tyler asked her if she wanted to go to a concert with him that weekend.

“Who is it?” Helen asked, and he said the name of a band she didn’t recognize.

“It’s British punk,” he explained.

“Oh, cool!” Helen tried to appear intrigued.

Tyler saw her expression and started laughing.

“I’m a bad liar!” She ducked her head and covered her face. “Sorry, but I find punk a little jarring.”

“Agreed.” Tyler raised his pint glass to toast, and she clinked hers into his.

“Then why do you like it?”

“I like the energy of it. Especially standing right at the stage.”

Maybe it made perfect sense that Tyler would like music that was so rousing and fast. He seemed so calm, so perhaps the aggressive sounds didn’t irritate him, as they did her, but rather fueled him. She wanted to see it: this man with his patient and grounded confidence, standing at the stage.

“I like most kinds of music though, not just punk,” he said. “I listen to film scores when I’m programming on my computer.”

“Okay, wow. That’s the other end of the spectrum,” she said. “Like instrumentals?”

“Right. Orchestral scores especially.”

“That’s interesting,” Helen said, picturing him in front of a computer, a symphony around him. She wanted to see all of these different shades of him. “I’ll go to the punk concert with you.”

“Yeah?” Tyler straightened up a little.

“Yeah. But only if we stand at the stage.”

He grinned. “Deal.”

Helen and Tyler stayed at the bar that night talking about everything and nothing until two o’clock in the morning, when the bartender tossed a damp rag on the counter and said, “Sorry, we’re closing.” Neither of them had noticed the entire place had cleared out while the ice in their tumblers melted.

That weekend, they went to the punk concert and crowded by the stage. Helen confirmed that she didn’t like punk music, but she learned that she loved watching Tyler sing along with it, his hands in the air. She raised hers next to his, every single song.

Chapter Ten

Present day

Boiling is a brisk and violent process. Helen only needed to simmer the stew, but she got distracted by the sound of the record player weeping, preoccupied with the violin strings talking to her in B minor.

Helen rarely listened to her record player, because it consumed precious electricity. Living remotely like this required her to make choices: Did she want to use a lantern in the kitchen while she cooked in the evenings, or did she want to use the overhead lighting? Her choice was always overhead lighting, which meant she rarely had the luxury of music. But Wade was in town tonight, and she was alone in the farmhouse, so she was using the overhead lighting and playing a record.

Not just any record. One of Tyler’s records.

Her long hair was coming loose from its bun, feet bare, hands clutched in front of her, eyes closed as she remembered slow dancing with him. This song had been his favorite instrumental. They had only ever bought a couple of dozen albums to play on the vintage Zenith record player she’d found in a thrift store. The moment she’d seen it, she’d fallen in love with the way it had looked inside its little beige portable suitcase and had to have it for their living room. The record player was one of the only material things she’d brought from her old life into this one. She’d left behind the punk and rock and pop records in her parents’ garage and brought only their four instrumental albums. That kind of music seemed fitting with this kind of life. At the time, she’d told herself it was a logical choice: If she wanted occasional music, a record player made sense, and instrumental music was timeless. But whenever she played it, she couldn’t escape the fact that she’d brought it out here the same way a child clings to teddy bears and blankets. She’d needed something that was hers and Tyler’s, something that Wade wouldn’t suspect was sentimental.

The instrumental song lodged the sorrow deeper inside her as she repeated his name in her head: Tyler, Tyler, Tyler, then eventually please, please, please, begging to no one for a reprieve.

The sudden knock on the door surprised her. She hadn’t wanted Wade to come home while she was playing this record, but he was earlier than expected.

Over the music, she heard a muffled “Helen?” Later, she would wonder if what she’d heard was Hello, not Helen.

“Hold on, Wade!” she called out.

She hurried across the kitchen to the door and undid the deadbolt, then hurried back to the wood stove and moved the boiling cast-iron pot from the burner. She stirred the stew with a large spoon, trying to loosen the bits that had burned to the bottom of the pot.

Footsteps entered.

“It’s almost ready. You get what you needed?” she asked.

When no answer came, Helen turned back and saw the man standing in the middle of her kitchen.

She hadn’t unlocked the door for her husband.

She’d unlocked the door for a stranger.

He was tall with dark hair and several days of stubble. He had on a thick coat and well-worn jeans. She felt a dangerous energy crackling around her as she became aware of her bare feet. The man standing in her kitchen wore work boots.

For a moment, they stared at each other.

The violin music got more urgent.

The man moved to the record player and lifted the needle. The song cut out abruptly. Now, eerie silence.

Helen’s eyes roamed the kitchen, settling on a table lantern made of metal and wood, heavy with sharp edges. Then she saw that the cooking knife was within reach.

She said, “I’m much closer to that knife than you are.”

The man looked at her strangely.

She said, “I promise I would stab you faster than you would stab me.”

The man showed little outward reaction except he studied the knife, as if assessing the blade. Finally he spoke, and the voice that came out was steady, but there was a roughness to it. “I think you’re misunderstanding,” he said. “Is Wade here?”

“Yes, he is. He’s in the back.”

The man’s eyes were dark, gripping, and Helen felt certain he knew she was lying. She braced for whatever was coming. When the man said nothing and didn’t move, she spoke again. “You know Wade?”

“You must be his wife.”

His familiarity with her circumstances meant nothing. He could have seen them in town together. Maybe he’d seen Wade alone in town tonight and knew it was his chance to catch her out here alone.

“Who are you?” Helen asked.

“I’m Isaac.”

“And how do you know Wade?”

Isaac raised an eyebrow. After a long moment, he said, “I’m his brother.”

She tried, and failed, to keep the surprise from her face. Wade had told her he was an only child.

Isaac chuckled but it had a cheerless sound. “He didn’t tell you about me, did he?”

She hesitated.

“It’s okay. You don’t need to cover for him. Where is he?” Isaac walked to the living room entry and peered in. “Wade?” he called out.

Helen used the opportunity to grab the kitchen knife. When Isaac turned back to her, he went still.

When he eventually spoke, his voice was softer, a tone to soothe wild horses. Or trick them. “I’m sorry. He’s not here, is he?”

So far, Isaac had met every one of her questions with a question of his own. But this was her kitchen, and she was the one holding the knife, so she didn’t answer him.

Finally, Isaac took a few careful steps back toward the front door. He shoved his hands in his front pockets and leaned against the wall, a picture of submission.

Helen knew what to do if she encountered one of the more dangerous wild animals in the woods. With bears, you were to stay calm, stay large, back away slowly, and not make eye contact. With cougars, it was the same protocol except you were to hold eye contact the entire time and talk to it. With men who broke into homes, she wasn’t sure. They behaved without patterns.

The overhead lights in the kitchen flickered.

Helen set the knife on the counter but kept her hand resting on the handle.

“Something in here smells good,” Isaac said. “Is that paprika?”

“He’ll be here any minute. Is he expecting you?”

“Not likely. I didn’t exactly get an invitation to your wedding.”

She regarded him suspiciously. His references indicated an intimate knowledge of their situation, but again, anyone could make these assumptions. If a couple were married, presumably they would have had a wedding of some kind. She waited for him to continue, to trip himself on a detail.

“I mean, I know you two didn’t have a formal wedding, but I could have been a witness at the courthouse. Our parents are dead, which I’m sure you know, or maybe you don’t.” He paused deliberately. It was a challenge.

Briskly, she said, “Yes, I know.”

“So I guess that made it easy for Wade to snub his only brother.”

Helen studied the planes of the man’s face more closely. He looked similar enough to Wade that it was possible they were biological brothers. He wasn’t classically handsome, but he possessed an attractive masculinity. He was just as tall as Wade, probably slightly taller, but otherwise not as physically imposing. He looked about her age, so possibly Wade’s younger brother by a few years. She removed her hand from the knife handle but otherwise did not move away from it.

“It wasn’t a snub,” she said. “It all happened quickly.”

Isaac waved his hand—Don’t worry about it—and Helen didn’t appreciate the pardon from a perfect stranger, but the feeling of annoyance that rose in her lessened her fear of him. This man seemed genuinely wounded that he hadn’t been invited to the wedding.

That, or he was a good actor.

“I think you should wait outside for Wade.”

Isaac straightened up from the wall. “Sure, I didn’t mean to scare you.” He paused, then added, “But if you were to get in trouble out here, I have to admit, that response there is pretty intimidating.” He looked at the knife that rested on the counter. “Just be sure you’re prepared to actually use that.”

Helen stared at him without blinking.

Isaac said, “But I think you are.”

He turned to the front door, but when he noticed the Poe book lying on the side table, he stopped. “Reading a little Poe?”

She watched guardedly as he picked up the book with an expression of sincere curiosity. Such a performance, she thought. She crossed her arms. The truth was, she didn’t feel threatened anymore. She just felt angry.

“What’s your favorite poem?” he asked.

“I don’t have a favorite.”

He opened the book to the page she’d folded down for the bird funeral. “It looks like your favorite is ‘The Raven.’”

“No, that’s just because I killed a bird today.”

“You killed a bird today,” he repeated, rolling the words around as if it was the most interesting declaration. He waited for an explanation. When none was forthcoming, he gestured toward the stew on the stove. “Is it in there?”

“No.”

“No?”

Helen could feel him circling her. Even though he now stood farther away from her than he had since he’d entered the house, she could feel him closing in. She pushed back against the feeling.

“It was an accident,” she said.

“How do you accidentally kill a bird?”

“The same way you purposefully kill a bird, except without intention. I shot it.”

“Are you a good shot?”

“I am.”

“What is your name, Wade’s wife?”

“Helen.” The circle closed tighter around her.

Isaac returned the book to the side table and faced her. He wasn’t going to go outside anymore and she didn’t know how to make him. She needed to find her shoes and socks. It wasn’t right that she was standing in the kitchen with her toes bare, the tips of her toenails white against her pale skin.

Then headlights briefly passed through the kitchen and broke apart the circle.

“That’s him,” Helen said, and Isaac visibly tensed. Interesting that he seemed composed when threatened with a knife, but now he rocked impatiently from one foot to the other.

Isaac watched the door expectantly, and Helen watched Isaac carefully. As she noticed the way he pressed his fingertips into the side of his leg, she realized her vantage point had shifted. Now she was far outside the circle, a spectator waiting to see what would unfold in this strange saga.

The front door opened and Wade appeared, smiling.

His smile fell away when he saw the man in the kitchen, and fear flashed there instead.

Chapter Eleven

Ten years, one month, and two days ago

Tyler’s hands gripped the steering wheel at ten and two. Normally he drove with his left hand at six and his right hand in his lap, relaxed but ready. Helen wished she could kiss away the tension in his hands, but no matter what reassurances she gave him, it didn’t seem to make a difference in his mood.

He flipped on the blinker and took the exit for Chuckanut Bay, in the southern part of Bellingham where he’d grown up. Helen and Tyler had been dating for six months now, and tonight they were staying at a bed and breakfast he had booked for them. Tomorrow, Helen would meet Tyler’s father, stepmother, younger brother, and younger sister at a gathering at his father’s house. She’d already met his mother and grandmother in Portland: both lovely women—funny, warm, endearing. It was no surprise to her that he had such a cool mom, but he’d been hesitant to introduce her to the rest of the family.

“You want a latte?” Tyler asked.

“Sure,” Helen said. “Let’s split one.”

She wasn’t really in the mood for a latte, but she could tell he was, and she wanted to lift his spirits.

He pulled into a drive-through espresso stand off the exit. The girl in the window who leaned out to take their order was a gorgeous little sprite, probably a college student at the university in town. The fall quarter was just beginning. The girl brightened when she made eye contact with Tyler.

“Can I please get a vanilla latte?” Tyler asked. That was their normal order.

“Of course you can!” The girl smiled at him, and she held it a beat longer than normal. Helen knew the girl was appreciating how attractive he was. Girls often did that, but for the most part, he seemed oblivious to it.

When Tyler and Helen had started dating, she had expected to see him move through the world with the same charm he’d given her that first day when they’d roamed the entire floor of his company looking for a pretend Daphne. But instead of a playful charisma, she’d seen him exhibit a reserved kindness and politeness with most people. He’d told her he used to be a shy kid, and the more time she spent with him, the more she realized he really was on the quieter side with most people and didn’t go out of his way to charm strangers. His humor was appreciated by his closest friends and family as private asides that made you feel like you’d been invited to an exclusive party. He rarely put his jokes on public display. He said he’d been that way with Helen that first day in the office building only because he’d felt an irresistible pull to her. Something about her had made him feel comfortable joking right away. He’d never felt anything like that until her.

Those were the kind of words they used with each other: Never. Until you.

In her mind, Helen tended to categorize her past romances. There were two ex-boyfriends she wished well, but those relationships had run a (somewhat) satisfying enough course and ended as preordained. There was an off-and-on situation that had both excited and confused her and stretched on far too long but now only gave her feelings of indifference. A messy handful of disappointing dates, initial attractions that fizzled before things ever got going, and one asshole that she hoped would fall off a mountain face.

This romance with Tyler wasn’t like any others. It was the love story she had always wanted to live. When she’d brought him to her family’s Fourth of July picnic and introduced him around the lakeside gathering, she’d observed a curiosity and attentiveness among her relatives that neither of her ex-boyfriends had ever inspired. Helen’s aunt had literally spooned the potato salad into a bowl for Tyler and wiped the tines of a fork on the front of her own T-shirt to make sure it was clean. “Sorry, picnic dirt,” she’d apologized. That day was the second time Helen’s parents had seen Tyler, and when Helen had commented that everyone seemed to like him, her mother had said, “Of course they do,” as if it were a foregone conclusion.

Helen hoped Tyler saw her as a foregone conclusion too. She knew he found her energy irresistible: her outbursts of enthusiasm over how soft fleece was and how fascinating the gorillas at the zoo were and how simultaneously sweet and bitter real black licorice was. He said life was a million times more interesting with her in it. He was always saying sweet things to her.

As he pulled away from the espresso stand, she reached for the latte.

“Wait, it might be hot,” he said, not relinquishing the cup. He brought it to his lips and took a small sip. “It’s not too bad,” he said, and passed the cup to her.

She was only going to drink a little bit. She had a hard enough time falling asleep as it was. Getting caffeinated in the afternoon wouldn’t help matters, and she didn’t want to feel and look exhausted the next day when she was to finally meet the rest of Tyler’s family.

A couple of months ago, when Helen had broached the topic, Tyler had said, “It’s always drama with them.”

“So?” she replied. “Isn’t that family?” As an only child with just a few cousins, she thought the chaos of a big family sounded appealing.

Tyler’s mouth tightened. “They’re not like my mom.”

“What are they like?”

“The hot mess express.”

She laughed at first, but then she stopped when she saw how serious his face was. “What does that even mean?”

“Helen, one of my last girlfriends left my dad’s house in tears. My stepmom has a way of making people feel terrible, and she does it on the sly—not in front of everyone—then acts confused when people call her on it. She’s diabolical. And my dad believes everything she says. I’m serious when I say none of my ex-girlfriends could get along with Evelyn.”

Helen knew of a few girls that Tyler had dated before her, the usual backstory mentions. “Goodness, how many girls did you introduce to your stepmother?”

“Just two.”

She wasn’t able to help but feel glad the number was low. “That’s not enough to be a trend. That could just be a coincidence.”

At the time, Helen hadn’t felt worried. She’d told herself she would shrug off anything unpleasant, not take it personally.

But now, sitting in the car with Tyler, seeing how tense he was, she was beginning to feel the tension herself. She knew his dad had cheated on his mom with the Wicked Stepmother when Tyler was in college, and it had disrupted the family dynamics. Tyler’s younger brother, Leo, had been fifteen at the time and had been crushed. Now, if anyone tried to call him out on his apparent binge drinking problem or overly crass sense of humor, he played the child of divorce card as the reason for anything and everything. Bellingham was home to Western Washington University, and Leo was starting his junior year there. There was no Greek system, but Tyler said Leo epitomized the concept of a frat boy.

Helen tried to reassure Tyler whenever he got worried. “I don’t mind inappropriate jokes. I kind of like inappropriate jokes.”

“Yeah, Helen. With your friends. With people you know. Not with my drunk brother you just met who can’t read a room.”

Secretly though, she was anticipating being great friends with his younger brother. Whenever Tyler described Leo, he sounded troubled, yes, but he also just sounded deeply sensitive.

Tyler’s younger sister, Gracie, was a bit of an enigma, though. Every story about her seemed to contradict the last one. She’d graduated from high school just a little over a year ago, so it made sense she was still figuring out who she was, but the stories still gave Helen whiplash. At times, Gracie sounded softhearted and considerate. Other times, she was the storm cloud that blew in with “some douchebag boyfriend.” Sometimes she was flaky and left texts and calls unanswered for a week, and sometimes she stepped up and handled the hard things, like their grandmother’s heart attack. Gracie had moved in with Grammy for three weeks to help her get back on her feet, though Tyler said it was probably because she just wanted an excuse to quit the barista job she was working during her gap year. He called it a “quote-unquote gap year,” because he didn’t believe Gracie was actually going to enroll in community college this year like she claimed.

Tyler eased the car into the Ambrose Bed and Breakfast situated on the bay. It was a gothic Tudor-style mansion of red bricks with ivy crawling up the front walls. A wraparound driveway circled a large fountain, and two stone lions flanked the front door. Cherry trees were scattered around the front yard with strings of delicate golden lights crisscrossing their branches.

His face softened at the magic of it all.

Helen said, “Tyler, this place looks so romantic.”

“We were Chuckanut Bay’s original brothel,” the bespectacled woman behind the front desk said brightly.

“Oh?” Helen perked up. “Did you know this when you booked?” she asked Tyler.

He was signing the check-in form. His eyes smiled at her, but his face still looked tired as he shook his head no.

Helen turned back to the front desk woman. “Are there any working girls here still?” Tyler’s shoulders moved slightly, a ripple of silent laughter.

“You’re over a hundred years too late. Not since 1907.” The woman beamed and adjusted the glasses on the bridge of her nose, delighted to give the historical spiel. “This house was originally a brothel, then it was the private residence of a lumber baron, a wedding venue, and now it’s a bed and breakfast.” She gestured to the hallway off the lobby. “There are historic photos that show the house in different eras. You’ll notice much of its character has been preserved, including the English gardens in the back.”

Tyler handed back the credit card form, and the woman gave them their room keys.

“If you go down that hall, you’ll find a lovely drawing room where we’ll be serving tea in . . .” She checked her wristwatch. “Oh! About ten minutes. Your room is one of the ones off the drawing room. You’ll see the number on the door.”

Helen looped her arm through Tyler’s. “Let’s take a look at our room before we get our bags.”

She pulled him down the hallway of cherry wood paneling, slowing at the large, framed photographs.

“The house still has the same trellis.” Helen pointed at a grainy photo in a black frame. “Look, they kept a lot of the original stuff. Oh, that must be the butler. He looks grumpy.”

She glanced at Tyler. His gaze was fixed in the direction of the photos, but he still seemed far away.

“Okay, get ready,” Helen said, and a curious light entered his eyes. “Whoever spots a harlot first gets a shoulder massage,” she said and planted herself directly in front of him. She rose up on her toes to try to block the photographs from his view.

“Hey, no fair.” Tyler put his hands on her waist and tried to move her aside, but she braced her feet.

“Who said anything about ‘fair’?”

“Look, I found a harlot!” he exclaimed. “She’s right here, in the flesh.” He squeezed her sides, and she giggled as he said, “I win.”

“I meant find a harlot in the photos.” She leaned back against him. “Plus you know I gave up prostitution once we started dating.”

“Oh, I misunderstood the rules.”

“There they are!” Helen slid over in front of a large black-and-white framed image that showed at least two dozen working girls gathered in front of the house. “Do you think this place is haunted?”

Tyler leaned in for a closer look. “I mean, I hope so.”

She laughed. “Who do you hope is haunting us?”

A smile played in the corner of his mouth, and she felt relieved that he was finally loosening up. “Like, which prostitute do I want to be haunted by?”

“Yeah.”

“The only girl I’d want to haunt me is you.”

The whole conversation was so silly, but it filled Helen with sweetness nonetheless. “Deal,” she said. “But if you die first, I want you to haunt me.”

“No deal.”

“No?”

“I’m not that mean, Helen.”

“I didn’t say flicker my lights and rearrange my furniture to scare the hell out of me. Just visit me in my bed at night.”

Tyler stepped behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist. He nuzzled his face in her neck. “Okay, maybe just that.”

“It would be mean if you didn’t do that.”

“You’re right. That would be kind of mean.”

Helen glanced down the hallway. Still empty. “Show me what you’d do to me,” she whispered.

“Here?” he asked.

She nodded, and he gave her a look like he really would strip all her clothes right there and then, and she giggled. Then he took her hand and led her to the hexagon-shaped drawing room at the end of the hallway with a velvet sofa, several wingback chairs, and tables. There they paused.

“Here?” Tyler asked.

“Right on this sofa,” Helen replied.

Then they both laughed.

Several numbered doors led off the drawing room, and Tyler unlocked their door, revealing a four-poster bed draped in a rich purple bedspread.

Helen didn’t give him a chance to move toward the bed though. Instead, she yanked his shirt off as soon as the door shut behind them and shoved him against the wall beside a window with white curtains overlooking a sunken English garden. Tyler pulled the curtains all the way shut, then reached for her shirt.

She sighed as she felt the soft cotton pull over her head. She made the sound because it was how she felt but also because she knew he loved the sound of her exhales, the sound of her voice, the sound of anything that came out of her. She wanted to make his anxious thoughts fade away, wanted to make this so good for him that he’d know tomorrow would be okay, no matter what.

As the rest of their clothes were coming off, voices started to collect on the other side of the wall. Teatime in the drawing room.

Helen wrapped her arms around Tyler’s neck, and as their naked bodies pressed together, they could hear a woman ask if there was any honey for the tea.

“These walls are thin,” Tyler said under his breath.

“So the patrons could hear what they were missing,” Helen said. “It’s good for business at the brothel.”

She tugged him toward a low antique dresser against the wall. She sat on the edge of the dresser and spread her legs. “Let the patrons hear what they’re missing.”

“God, Helen.”

Tyler was inside her in one hard thrust that sent the antique dresser rattling against the paper-thin wall. After that, he tried to be quiet, but she kept pulling him into her deeper, telling him how she wanted it, telling him how good he was. The more she talked to him, the more powerless he became. He was no longer trying to be quiet, and the dresser hit the wall more than once.

Then, abruptly, Tyler stopped and rested his head on Helen’s shoulder. “I just almost came,” he said, holding still inside her. He was going to wait for her, but she didn’t want him to wait. He was completely at her mercy, and that was a different kind of turn-on.

“Yes, come for me,” she said. “Right now, Tyler.”

She didn’t have to tell him again. She felt him let go on her command, and it filled her with a powerful kind of satisfaction.

She wanted to be the only woman who could ever haunt this man.

“Do you want to get tea with the others?”

Tyler chuckled. “God no.”

They were lying in a tangle of sheets on the bed. Sex on the dresser had been followed with an encore on the bed, slightly less feverish, but still emotionally charged. And now Helen lazily ran her fingertips through Tyler’s soft hair. The summer sun on their weekend hikes and beach days had bleached some of his sandy strands to pure blond. He closed his eyes and sighed, and she thought of the Persian cat she’d had as a little girl and how if she stilled her hand for even a moment, it would push its head against her palm. She stopped moving her hand, and Tyler angled his head toward her ever so slightly. More, please. She smiled to herself and trailed her fingers across his head and down his neck.

After a bit, his drowsy voice said, “Thank you, Helen.”

He was already drifting to sleep as she said, “I got you, baby. I promise it’s going to be okay.”

She looked toward the window and could see through a gap behind the ruffled curtains into the garden where several angel statues were situated in a circle. They were weathered and ancient. For a moment, she considered how many women—from the glowing ones to the broken ones—had sat here and gazed out at those very same angels through the years. The prostitutes. The wife of the lumber baron. New brides. Hotel patrons like her.

Those angels had been there long before she was born, observing it all, and she wondered if they’d still be there after she was gone.

Chapter Twelve

Present day

Wade and Isaac held eye contact for an uncomfortable length of time, unblinking and unmoving, and Helen knew she was witnessing the unspooling of something bigger than this moment. If she had been outside looking up at the night sky, she might have seen a ripple in the cosmos.

Isaac spoke first. “That’s how you greet your own brother?”

He stepped forward and wrapped Wade in a bear hug. Wade’s hands didn’t quite make their way around Isaac to hug him back. Instead, they got stuck in the air, rigid and uncertain, as he looked at Helen over Isaac’s shoulder.

Wade asked softly, “Are you okay?”

She nodded. Her eyes returned to the knife she’d left on the counter.

Isaac stepped back from Wade but continued to hold him at arm’s length, the way you would hold a friend—Let me look at you—but Helen felt there might be an implicit threat in the way Isaac squeezed Wade’s arms.

“Sorry, Wade,” Isaac said. “I think I startled your wife when I showed up.”

“I imagine you did,” Wade said, in a tone so neutral that it couldn’t actually be neutral.

Isaac looked at her, his expression apologetic now. Wade never took his eyes off Isaac.

Isaac let go of Wade’s arms. “I would have called, but you have no phone.”

Wade studied Isaac for a long moment before asking, “What’s going on?” To Helen, the question sounded like a subtle accusation.

Isaac must have heard it too, because his answer held a note of sadness. “I just wanted to see you again. I’ll have dinner, then be on my way.”

Isaac’s gaze lowered to the floor, and suddenly Helen saw him differently. She’d been quick to perceive his unexpected arrival as a threat, but now she clearly saw the vulnerability in his face. Wade was not denying Isaac’s claim to kinship, and whatever brotherly troubles there had been in the past, did it matter? Isaac was family, and frayed family threads were worth stitching back together. Yes, he’d startled her when he’d arrived, but she was the one who’d mistakenly invited him inside her house and then pulled a knife on him—from his perspective, for no reason. Perhaps it wasn’t that Isaac was being threatening so much as it was that she and Wade were being inhospitable. She wanted him to stay.

Helen watched Wade wrestle with some kind of decision. After a few stiff moments, he nodded and hung the truck keys on a hook above the entry bench. His hands shook slightly as he did so, and she felt a burst of tenderness. He wasn’t even very good at communicating with her, so of course he had to be nervous about seeing his estranged brother.

She moved to him. “Your boots?”

Wade sat on the bench, and Helen knelt to help him untie the crisscross of laces. By the end of a long workday, the tight cinching was usually easier for her smaller hands to unravel than his larger, tired ones.

“Did you want to get cleaned up?” she asked, as the leather loosened.

Normally this was when Wade would let out a relieved sigh and crack his ankles as he pulled them free from the boots, but instead, he was a coil of tension.

“Wade?” she pressed. “Are you going to clean up?”

He always took his bath before dinner. When two people lived alone in the middle of nowhere, you could go one of two ways. You could either clean up for each other and make a presentation of being presentable, or you could fall into shambles together. Helen certainly had days when she rolled out of bed and felt like leaning into the wild and the dirt and the solitude. So far, though, they were still cleaning up for each other.

But tonight, Wade said, “I’m fine.”

“Okay.”

Helen was about to ask Isaac if he wanted to remove his coat when she turned back and saw it was already draped over one of the kitchen chairs, and the sleeves of his black canvas work shirt were pushed partway up his forearms.

“I’ll hang that for you.” She took Isaac’s coat from the chair.

As she hung it on a hook above the entry bench, she spotted her socks next to her reading chair in the living room. She walked in there to collect them, relieved she wouldn’t have to be running around barefoot any longer, hoping that Isaac wasn’t watching her from the kitchen. She didn’t look over as she pulled her socks on, but she heard him talking to Wade. “You know Ma wouldn’t have approved of you coming to the dinner table so dirty.” And Wade responded with a resolute, “I’m good.”

Helen reentered the kitchen to find Wade standing behind one of the chairs at the table, gripping the back of it tightly, knuckles white. It gave her pause, but until the men stopped talking in riddles and she could get a handle on what their troubles were, all she could do was wait it out by playing the role of hostess.

“I hope you like vegetable stew, Isaac,” Helen said as she got out the soup bowls from the cupboard.

“It smells amazing.” Isaac smiled. It was a disarming smile once he let it loose, and she realized it was the first time he’d smiled since he’d stepped inside the farmhouse.

Isaac asked, “Does my brother make his famous curry chicken dish for you?”

“What?” Helen gave Wade an inquisitive glance. “No. He has a famous dish?”

“He only makes it under duress.”

“You have a curry chicken dish, Wade?”

“I know how to put some curry powder on chicken while it’s in a dish.” Wade’s tone was unamused.

Helen turned to the stove, and the kitchen fell silent except for the clank of the metal spoon as she served stew into the ceramic bowls.

Isaac asked, “Is there a bathroom I could use?”

“Down the hall,” she said. “First door.”

As soon as Isaac was gone, she set aside the stew and approached Wade. He met her halfway and they spoke in hushed voices.

“What is this?” Helen asked.

“How long has he been here?” Wade asked over her words.

“Just a few minutes.”

“What did he say?”

“Why didn’t you tell me you had a brother?”

“Did he say anything, do anything? What happened?”

“Nothing.” She didn’t like the urgency in Wade’s tone. She looked toward the hallway, felt the fear creeping back in. “What’s wrong?”

When Wade didn’t answer immediately, Helen knew something truly was wrong. She thought of how Isaac had walked across her kitchen, wordless, and lifted the needle from her record player as though it was his song.

She picked up the knife from the counter.

“Tell me what’s happening.”

Chapter Thirteen

During the eighteen months that Helen and Wade had lived in the farmhouse in the woods, she had gone out to investigate sounds in the middle of the night seven times. Five of those times, including last night, she’d felt certain a person was trespassing and she’d resorted to shouting into the night air. Two of those times, Wade had slept through her shouting, but three of those times, he had awoken. He was therefore accustomed to seeing her wield a gun, but he’d never seen her hold a knife for any purpose other than cooking him dinner.

His eyes flashed with distress, and she realized the knife itself unsettled him. In his mind, guns were for hunting. They were for animal kills and good old American recreation. His wife defending his property with a gun in the middle of the night made a semblance of sense, but his wife in stocking feet clutching a knife in the kitchen was madness. He wasn’t wrong. He hadn’t seen the things knives could do to people, the things Helen had seen. If he had, maybe he would have grabbed a knife too and gotten ready.

“Helen, put the knife down.” Wade’s command came out with a firmness that surprised her. She wasn’t sure if it was true self-assurance or if he was speaking with confidence now to mask something else.

“No.” She searched his face. “Why are you acting like this?”

“He surprised me is all.”

“You seem more than surprised.”

Wade shook his head. “No, just . . . really surprised.”

He walked to the opening that led to the living room and the hall, and Helen noticed how stiff his gait was, how square his shoulders looked. He peered around the corner, then back at her with pleading eyes. “You want him to come back in here and see you like that, holding a knife?”

Yes, she kind of did.

“Helen, it’s fine.” Wade went to her, his tone reassuring now, and he rested his hand on her shoulder. “Let me handle this.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you had a brother?”

“Because I never thought I’d see him again.”

“You had a falling-out?”

Pained expression, he nodded.

It wasn’t hard for Helen to imagine Wade getting into an argument with someone and shutting down, letting the wound fester until the estrangement grew from temporary to permanent. You could fill an ocean with all the stubborn and scared men in the world who hid behind some idea of strong and silent, and Wade could be the sea captain of it.

She set the knife on the counter and asked, “Is that really all it is?”

“Just let me think.”

Helen rested a hand on his arm. “If you had a falling-out, he must be here to make amends. It’s never too late for that.”

“Sometimes it is,” Wade said softly.

“No, family is family.” She gently touched his cheek. “He came here. He must miss you.”

Clap! Helen and Wade jumped apart, startled by the sound of Isaac clapping his hands together as he reentered the kitchen.

“How about some of Helen’s stew?” Isaac said in a booming voice, as if he were anticipating a long-awaited meal of a famous family recipe.

Helen picked up two bowls of stew, but Isaac was already there to take them from her hands and deliver them to the table. He set them on the two blue and gray woven place mats across from each other at the heads of the table. Earlier, she’d set the place mats with utensils and cream cloth napkins.

“Wade, would you please get another place mat and napkin?” Helen asked as she scooped a third bowl. He didn’t move as she got an extra pair of utensils from the drawer. “Wade?”

Finally, he left the room, and Helen approached Isaac and spoke in a low voice. “I’m sure it means so much to Wade that you came. He’s just a little surprised.” She smiled. “And you’re my first dinner guest.”

She brightened at the thought. The farmhouse walls that always watched and whispered would witness a proper little dinner party for once. She set the third bowl and the extra set of utensils on the table.

“You don’t get many visitors?” Isaac asked.

She shook her head. Feeling a sudden flush of shame, she turned to the cupboard to get three water glasses. For some reason, she didn’t want Isaac to see the loneliness in her. She busied herself filling the glasses and delivering them to the table, feeling his eyes on her the entire time.

Wade reappeared with a green woven place mat and brown napkin in one hand and a large wooden frame in the other hand. Inside the frame was a black-and-white photograph of Wade’s mom in her twenties, a beautiful but somber-looking woman. It usually hung on the wall in their hallway. The first time Helen had seen the photo, she’d assumed it was his grandmother or great-grandmother, perhaps Depression-era because there was something hungry and haunted in the woman’s eyes. But no, it was just a studio portrait, printed in black and white as an artistic choice, and whatever was starving his mother had nothing to do with food.

Wade set the extra place mat and napkin on the table and laid the framed photo next to it. Isaac sat down, studying the portrait, and Wade took a seat at the head of the table.

“Ma always looked so sad in old photos,” Isaac said. “Even when she was young.”

“She loved us.”

Isaac looked up at Wade, and some kind of silent communication passed between them. The lights flickered in the house.

“Tough love though, wouldn’t you say?” Isaac said. His voice had a harsh edge to it, and Helen couldn’t tell if it was anger or pain she was detecting. Maybe both. She lingered by the stove, not wanting to intrude.

“She raised us the way she knew,” Wade said. “But she wanted us to be good brothers.”

Isaac made a noise deep in his throat. “What about Dad? His photo hanging up around here?”

Wade shook his head no.

The whole exchange showed Helen how little she knew about Wade’s parents. He’d made them sound like simple, straightforward farm folks. There was clearly some deeper history.

Wade took the framed portrait and leaned it against the leg of the table, out of sight. Whatever he’d been hoping to accomplish with the conversation, it hadn’t appeared to go his way, but Helen was impressed he’d tried.

Isaac looked over at her expectantly, the warmth back in his face, the moment between the brothers seemingly now over.

So she settled at the table across from Wade. She didn’t know why he hadn’t gotten a matching place mat and napkin. The green and brown of Isaac’s setting clashed with the pretty blue, gray, and creams of the other two place settings. She considered going to the hall closet and finding the correct one, but she didn’t want to seem fussy, so instead, she dipped her spoon into the stew and tested the temperature with her lips. “Oh, careful, it’s hot.”

Isaac dug in and took a bite without hesitation.

Wade made no move to eat. He just watched Isaac.

Again, that annoying flickering of the lights.

Isaac said, “What’s up with your lights?”

Wade said, “The battery’s getting low. The generator should kick in.”

Helen blew on a spoonful of stew and caught Isaac looking at her. His face was neutral but his eyes smiled. She put the bite in her mouth, trying to do so delicately. She hadn’t eaten in front of anyone other than Wade in a year and a half. What a weird thing it was to put a bite of food in your mouth and chew while another person watched you do it. She could hear her jaw moving in her eardrum. Was it always that loud?

Helen swallowed and asked, “Isaac, where do you live?”

Isaac took another bite and talked around it, managing to keep his mouth closed enough to conceal the food within. “Wade and I grew up in a small town in central Oregon. Capichon.” He swallowed and gulped down some water. He probably wasn’t worried about the sound of his own jaw in his ear.

“Wade told me a little about it,” Helen said. “Are you still living there?”

“I was. I’m passing through now.”

“Where are you off to?”

“Not sure yet. I’m up for an adventure.”

Something shimmered in Helen’s face. Adventure. She and Tyler had used that word often. Plans to go to Europe. Specifically Italy, Greece, and Spain.

Suddenly, she realized Isaac was staring at her. He must have said something to her while she was remembering lost plans. “I’m sorry, what?”

“I was just commenting on how peaceful the woods are.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“How close is your nearest neighbor?”

Helen said, “A few miles” at the same time that Wade said, “Practically next door,” and Isaac pretended not to notice. She glanced at Wade. How odd that he was now embarrassed by how remotely they lived when he’d always acted so proud of it before.

Isaac took another big bite of stew, and Helen wished she had dinner rolls to serve. Judging by the size of his bites, it seemed he wasn’t getting enough to eat on the road.

Isaac said, “I passed through a town twenty miles back. Is that the nearest one?”

“Yeah,” Helen said. “Once a month, we go in for supplies.”

“You’ve been stuck out here alone for an entire month?”

A shadow crossed her face. “Longer for me. I missed our last couple trips.”

“So other than me,” Isaac said, “you’ve seen no one but Wade for two, three months?”

“Three.”

“Three?!”

“There’s a neighbor though. Agnes. She hikes here to visit me every now and then when Wade’s out working.”

Isaac said, “Seems like you could choke on your own thoughts out here after a while.”

“Not really. It gives you a chance to sort out your thoughts and enjoy simple things.” Helen couldn’t meet Wade’s eyes. She was having a hard time keeping the sadness out of her tone, and she didn’t want to know if he could hear it.

The lights began to flicker again.

Isaac said, “I understand that.”

This time the flickering wasn’t temporary, and after a moment the lights cut out entirely, plunging the room into total darkness. After only a second, they came back on for a single flash.

In that flash, Helen saw a figure standing directly behind Wade. A woman in a dirtied nightgown, head down, long, tangled dark brown hair obscuring her face. It was only a split-second image in the light. As the house plummeted into blackness again, Helen drew in a breath to scream. But the terror of it—the impossibility of what she’d seen—kept her frozen instead, and the scream died inside her.

The lights were restored, steady now, and Helen sat rigid in her seat. Wade was still staring at Isaac. And Isaac, who should have seen the woman too, appeared unconcerned.

She turned to Isaac, the shock plain on her face. “Did you not see that?”

“See what?”

“Behind Wade? I thought . . .”

Isaac leaned in, listening intently. Warily, Wade watched the exchange.

She hesitated. If Isaac hadn’t seen it, describing it to him wasn’t going to suddenly make him think he had. It was just going to make her sound insane.

Finally, she said, “I guess my eyes were playing tricks on me. With the light.”

Isaac nodded in understanding. “It’s called an afterimage. Your brain can still hold images briefly after the lights go out.”

Helen remembered discovering this herself as a little girl. In early childhood, she’d been scared of the dark, so at bedtime her parents would leave her bedroom door cracked four fingers wide so she could see the light in the hallway. The difference between her darkened bedroom and the bright hallway had been significant, and when she lay in her bed and looked out at the hallway, she would sometimes close her eyes and still see the bright images behind her eyelids for a few seconds. She would do it over and over to remind herself that she wasn’t in total darkness.

This wasn’t that though. Her eyelids weren’t holding on to images of the kitchen cupboards. There had been a chilling womanly presence standing behind Wade, yet Isaac hadn’t seen it.

“That’s what happens when you die,” Isaac continued. “The heart can stop beating, but the brain still glimmers with images.” He spoke matter-of-fact, seemingly unaware of the effect his words were having on Helen. “If you’ve ever seen someone die, you can sense it—that the brain is still firing.”

If you’ve ever seen someone die . . .

“Doctors have observed brain activity ten minutes after a person’s heart has stopped beating,” Isaac said.

Helen fixed her vision on the far wall. How nice that Isaac lived in a reality where he could assume that others hadn’t seen a loved one die and that educating them on the science of it would be a welcome intellectual conversation.

He added, “The genes can also keep functioning for days. Apparently.”

She looked at him sharply. “What does that even mean?”

“I’m not a scientist, but there’s been studies that show activity in the cells of dead bodies.”

Helen set her spoon down. “Let’s talk about something else.”

Isaac had only a moment to register surprise before Wade interrupted, his voice cold and hard. “How did you find us, Isaac?”

Isaac’s response came out friendly. “That letter you sent Aunt Sue.”

Wade tilted his head and narrowed his eyes.

“I was proud of you, Brother. Buying up such a large piece of land like you always dreamed. So how is timber management going?”

“Just fine,” Wade said curtly.

When he didn’t elaborate, Helen jumped in. She needed to get her mind into a better place, and she needed to try to salvage this bizarre little dinner party. “Today he was out marking the trees that need to be removed. When the sunlight and rain can’t get in, some of the trees will start to die if you don’t thin them.”

“Ahhh,” Isaac said slowly, as if coming to a realization of great importance. “Sometimes you have to kill one to save the rest. Right, Wade?”

Abruptly, Wade stood, his chair scraping loudly on the floor. “Helen, I need to talk to you. In the bedroom.” He barked it at her as if she were an unruly child.

Helen felt the heat in her face. In the early days of her marriage to Wade, she had told herself that it wasn’t fair for her to compare him to Tyler. All marriages were different, and Tyler had been a special kind of special that most people never find. Comparisons would just make her (and Wade) unhappy. More and more, though, she found herself thinking, Tyler would never do that. Tyler would never talk to me like this. Tyler would never act like that.

She took a moment, then stood and followed Wade out of the room.

Chapter Fourteen

Ten years, one month, and one day ago

The sun was hitting off the bay, casting a golden glow over the entire neighborhood.

As Helen peered out the passenger window of the parked car, she was struck by how enchanting Tyler’s childhood home was. It was a storybook house with three little pointed, gabled roofs. The uneven shingles made her think of straw hatch.

The entire street was charming, each house unique, but all with a front yard facing the bay as the suburban blocks sloped downward toward the water. It was the kind of neighborhood Helen would love to jog in and pick out favorite houses as she ran past.

“You grew up in Hansel and Gretel’s house,” she said.

“Can we please not bring up fairy tales with witches in them?”

Tyler’s eyes were teasing though. That morning, he’d awoken beside her at the bed and breakfast in a lighter mood, no longer as nervous about introducing her to his father, siblings, and not-so-nice stepmother.

Helen asked, “Don’t most fairy tales have witches in them?”

“No, some have wolves that eat grandmothers and little girls.”

“But in the end, a lumberjack cuts the wolf open and saves them.”

“Sorry to break it to you, Helen. That’s the kid-friendly version. In the original version of ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ the wolf wins. He eats the grandma and then the little girl, and he flees the house, happy and full.”

She gasped, pretend-scandalized. “That’s dark.”

He smiled. “Very.”

“I like the wolf,” Helen said. “He’s clearly a genius.”

“You’re dark.” Tyler laughed and reached into the back seat to grab the box of chocolates and the bottle of white wine. “Which do you want?”

“The wine.”

He handed her the wine and kept the chocolates. Then he took a deep breath, and she watched as the playfulness left him on the exhale and tension replaced it.

“What was that?” she said.

“What?”

“I just watched you turn from Tyler the Magical Professor of Grimms’ Fairy Tales to Tyler the Uptight Mall Security Guard.”

“I think some mall security guards would object to that description,” Tyler said with a deadpan delivery. Then he said in a more thoughtful tone, “We need a code word. In case you need me to rescue you.”

“No, if you go in there expecting things will go badly, you’re setting yourself up for failure.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“I mean it. Let’s go in there expecting the best from your stepmom and dad, expecting to laugh with your brother, and expecting the unexpected from your sister, and that in and of itself will be a fun surprise. Let’s go in there like rays of sunshine.”

A sweet, slow smile spread over Tyler’s face. “How about we go in there like wolves?”

“Even better.”

At the front door, he reached for her hand and said, “The code word is ‘lumberjack.’ Just work it into any sentence.”

Helen laughed and squeezed his hand as they waited for someone to answer.

That someone turned out to be the Wicked Stepmother Evelyn. As the woman said, “Hello, Tyler!” Helen told herself to stop thinking of her as the Wicked Stepmother.

“Hi, Evelyn!” Tyler let go of Helen’s hand and stepped forward to give Evelyn a quick hug. Then he stepped back, angling his body toward Helen, gesturing her into the fold. “This is Helen.”

Helen went for the hug just as Evelyn extended her hand to shake, and she accidentally crushed Evelyn’s hand between their chests, because the hug was already in motion as Tyler put an encouraging hand on Helen’s back.

“Sorry,” Helen mumbled. The confidence she’d felt was already fading. “So nice to meet you.”

When they stepped apart, Evelyn straightened the pearl necklace that hung over her crisp white blouse, and Helen straightened her blue cotton sweater—not because it needed straightening, but because she was instinctively mirroring the older woman. Evelyn reminded Helen of a character in a daytime soap opera, elegant but overly dressed and pressed for what was just a family barbecue. Evelyn was in her early fifties, but her refined appearance made her seem both older and timeless.

“Something for your sweet tooth.” Tyler handed Evelyn the box of chocolates, and Helen was surprised by how formal it all felt. She had expected it to be more casual. She wanted to hold up the bottle of wine and say, “Something for the awkwardness,” but of course she didn’t.

Evelyn said, “Thank you, dear. Your father’s in the kitchen prepping the burgers.”

So they followed Evelyn from the foyer down a hallway, Helen still clutching the bottle of wine.

“How were your accommodations?” Evelyn asked over her shoulder.

“So nice,” Helen chimed in. “Have you ever seen the Ambrose? It’s really romantic. It was actually a brothel,” she said and instantly regretted it, so she quickly added, “But it’s not anymore.” Shit, obviously.

Helen shot Tyler an over-the-top desperate look, but underneath the humor, her nerves were truly starting to fray. He gave her a reassuring look.

“You two could have stayed here, you know.” Evelyn’s tone was an indictment.

“Next time,” Tyler said. “We wanted to book a couples’ thing.”

“Already needing to schedule your romantic time?” Evelyn said, and then she laughed as if she’d only meant it playfully, but it didn’t really feel that way.

Tyler rolled his eyes at Helen, and she forced a smile.

In the kitchen, Tyler’s dad, Gary, was brushing marinade on veggie skewers. He looked up, and warm introductions were made.

Then he said, “I’d give you a hug, but I’m not exactly in the shape to do that.” He gestured to his black chef’s apron, which was smeared with marinade.

“His barbecue apron is his favorite look,” Tyler said.

“It is,” Gary said. “Because it usually means my family is together.”

He grinned then, and Helen was struck by how much he resembled Tyler when he smiled. She found herself grinning too.

“What?” said Tyler.

“You two are definitely related,” Helen said. “Same smile.”

“You’re welcome, Son,” Gary said.

Tyler just laughed and shook his head.

Gary picked up a tray of hamburger patties with one hand and the veggie skewers platter with the other. “Get the back door for me, Tyler?”

Tyler glanced at Helen, and she nodded encouragingly. Go, go! And that’s how she ended up alone in the kitchen with Evelyn.

“This is for you.” Helen held up the bottle of wine.

Evelyn took the bottle and crinkled her nose as she read the label. “Is this from the grocery store?”

“Yeah, it is.” What did Evelyn expect? A bottle straight from a French vineyard?

Evelyn set the bottle on the counter. “Thank you, but Gary insisted on burgers, so we’re having hard ciders from a local brewery.”

“That sounds even better than wine.”

“Not really. I don’t care for cider, but with it likely being one of our last warm weekends, Gary wanted a proper barbecue. I may have to slip away though for a glass of wine. I prefer a strong Burgundy myself—2005 and 2002 were spectacular years. Do you have a favorite wine?”

“I like Burgundys too,” Helen said, even though to her there were just two kinds of wine: red and white. Too late, she realized pretending anything else was a bad idea.

“What’s your favorite Burgundy, dear?”

Helen smiled ironically. “Trader Joe’s?”

Evelyn didn’t smile. “I understand you work in the corporate world. It might behoove you to learn a bit about wine. I imagine many of your clients are oenophiles.”

Helen had never heard the word oenophile before, but she wasn’t going to ask its meaning. She could only guess from the context that it meant “wine lover.” Or as she stared at Evelyn’s face: “wine snob.”

“You’re right. I should,” Helen said. “I’m only twenty-three.”

“When I was twenty-three, I started a catering business for high-end clients.”

“Oh, that’s really cool!” Helen perked up to show how cool she thought it was, then she cleared her throat. “No, I meant I’m just starting to learn about wines. Since I’ve only had a couple years of drinking under my belt.” She wasn’t including the underage years of chugging cheap beer in the college dorm. “Do you drink wine a lot?”

The color drained from Evelyn’s face, and Helen wanted to take the question back. She’d simply been trying to talk to the woman about something that was clearly an interest of hers: wine! Yet Helen had obviously touched a nerve.

“No,” Evelyn said in a clipped voice. “I don’t drink wine a lot. Are you normally so rude when someone invites you into their home? Do you always inquire about everyone’s drinking habits?”

“I’m sorry, no. I didn’t mean it like that,” Helen said quickly.

“Would you like to know what medications I take too?”

“No. I just meant, do you, like, attend wine tastings or go to vineyards?”

“Perhaps you should go help Tyler and his father with the burgers now.”

She’d been dismissed. Helen felt a crowd of emotions rolling beneath the surface, and if she went outside and saw Tyler’s sweet face, she might burst into tears. So instead, she said, “Is there a bathroom I could please use first?”

“Down the hall. Third door on the left.” Evelyn didn’t even look at Helen when she said it.

Inside the bathroom, Helen turned on the faucet in case she did start to cry, but now that she was alone, she didn’t feel like crying. Instead, she felt the anger crash in like a runaway train.

What a disaster! She could see what Tyler meant about the Wicked Stepmother. The entire conversation had felt precarious from the beginning. It was as if Evelyn had been trying to keep her off-balance every step, as if she reveled in being cruel.

Looking in the mirror, Helen wet her fingertips in the running water and smoothed down the few flyaways at the part in her hair. She grabbed a tissue and blotted the shine on her nose. Then she licked her lips and smoothed the hem of her shirt. No way was she going to cry on the car ride home like Tyler’s last girlfriend! Helen was good at the sarcastic retort, the curtly raised eyebrow. Watch out, because she could out-bitch this bitch.

Faint voices from the backyard drifted in. Helen lifted the curtain to look out the small bathroom window and saw Tyler and his dad talking by the barbecue. Tyler tilted his head back, laughing at something his dad said. It tugged at her heart to see Tyler enjoying himself. When he spoke of his childhood, his stories about his dad were always fondly recounted. The post-divorce years had been bumpy though, and now he didn’t see his family enough. The main issue was Evelyn.

Sighing, Helen let the curtain fall back across the window.

She stared into the mirror, thinking deeply for several moments. Then she turned off the water and returned to the kitchen.

Evelyn was arranging flowers in a vase and didn’t look up when she entered.

“Evelyn,” Helen said. “I’m so sorry I upset you. I’m so embarrassed.”

Evelyn stopped fussing with the flowers and peered at Helen curiously.

Helen was surprised to feel the pressure behind her eyes. She blinked to keep the tears from springing into them. She didn’t know why she suddenly felt emotional. The words she was saying weren’t even entirely real. The whole thing was a performance of sorts, and she was no actress—she couldn’t call up tears on cue—so why was this speech making her feel this way?

“The thing is,” Helen continued, “I was just so nervous to come here. I just want you to like me so much, because you’re the center of this family.”

She felt the tears threatening again, but this time she didn’t blink them back, because maybe she wasn’t going to out-bitch this bitch anymore, but she just might outsmart her. As Helen’s eyes turned shiny, Evelyn’s face softened.

“You looked so elegant when you answered the door,” Helen said, “so I got even more nervous, and when I get nervous, I never know quite what to say . . .”

Evelyn came around the kitchen counter, opening her arms. “It’s okay, darling. Come here. I’m sorry.” She pulled Helen into a hug and said, “I get nervous too.”

As Helen inhaled the smell of Evelyn’s floral shampoo, her mind raced. What the hell was happening? Her goal had been apology accepted, not this.

“Don’t be upset.” Evelyn rubbed Helen’s back. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you. Sometimes Gary says I drink too much wine, but there’s no way you could have known that. And you might think I’m the center of this family, but I’m not. The kids barely tolerate me.”

“That’s not how Tyler talks about you at all,” Helen said. Lies, all lies.

Evelyn pulled back so she could see Helen’s face. Evelyn’s own expression was a mixture of doubt and hope. “Really?”

“Really. He told me how hard it was when the divorce first happened, but not anymore,” Helen said. “Tyler always says how crazy his dad is about you.” That part, at least, was more or less true.

Evelyn cleared her throat and stepped back, turning away. “Well, that’s nice to hear.”

Her voice sounded funny, and Helen realized that Evelyn was trying not to cry. She waited quietly until Evelyn finally turned back around and said, “Heavens. I thought there for a moment I was going to start crying. Of all things!” Evelyn exclaimed, as if crying was on par with joining the circus. “I never cry.”

“Never?”

“Not since my mother died when I was thirteen.”

“I’m sorry.” And Helen truly was. Beneath Evelyn’s prickly surface, there were sad layers.

“It is what it is, and tears don’t solve anything.” Evelyn nodded briskly as if everything was now settled. “I like you, Helen. I’m so glad Tyler is with you.” She smiled.

Helen smiled back at her, and then the slider to the backyard opened, and Tyler stepped inside. A smile was pasted on his face too, but Helen could see the uneasy expectation beneath it, the sense of How is it going in here? And suddenly she was swept into a wave of the same emotions she’d felt when she’d started her preplanned speech to win over Evelyn.

“Hey!” Helen said. “We were having a good conversation.”

Tyler brightened. “That’s great.”

As soon as Evelyn turned back to the flower arrangement, Tyler raised his eyebrows and mouthed “Lumberjack?” at Helen.

She pressed her lips together to keep from giggling and shook her head faintly, just enough so he’d know everything truly was good. He cleared his throat and looked down at the kitchen tiles, trying not to laugh. When he finally looked back up at her, his eyes were sparkling.

Seeing the joy in Tyler’s face, Helen knew then that he was the whole reason she’d felt so emotional, and she knew with certainty she’d find a way to get along with his stepmother if it helped him have a better relationship with his father and siblings. This was a small thing, really.

She would happily do this, and so much more, for him.

The treehouse seemed like a good hiding spot, nestled among the branches of the mighty oak in the corner of the backyard. The ladder leading up the thick tree trunk was partially covered in moss, and Tyler kept watch while Helen quickly ascended it.

“Hurry,” he called softly from below. “They’re coming back.”

Gary and Evelyn had gone inside the house, and Tyler wanted a moment alone. His brother and sister still hadn’t arrived.

Helen reached the top of the ladder and her head poked through a hole in the wooden floor of the small platform room. It smelled like sweet greenery and mildew. She climbed inside and unfolded her body, careful to keep her head bent down to avoid hitting the low roof. Branches stole through cracks in the ceiling and the walls, reclaiming the space. The interior of the treehouse was empty except for a bench seat and a few cardboard boxes, but Helen felt the ghosts of a charmed childhood.

As Tyler deftly climbed into the room, she lifted the flap of one of the boxes and pulled out a hardback, its pages curled and yellowed, the cover dotted in black specks.

“Tyler!” she said. “You can’t store books up here!”

He raised his palms in contrition. “I was a kid, and I thought keeping my books in my treehouse made perfect sense. No adults allowed. Just my friends and my cat and my stories.” He took the book from her and dropped it back in the box. “I didn’t understand humidity or mold.”

“Where’s your cat now?”

“Dead. He died nine years ago.”

“This is really depressing.” Helen plunked herself onto the bench seat and hung her head, letting her hair fall into a veil over her face. “I thought you were bringing me into your treehouse to ravage me, and instead you show me ruined books and tell me your cat is dead.”

He knelt in front of her. “I know. I’m terrible.” He rested his head in her lap. “Can you ever forgive me?”

“No. Never. This will scar me forever.” She gently ran her hand through his hair.

Tyler lifted his head. “Was Evelyn actually okay to you?”

Helen paused. She planned to tell him about her exchange with Evelyn at some point, but not right away. “She was okay. I think she means well.”

“That doesn’t sound like Evelyn. She must be running a fever.” Tyler picked up Helen’s hand and turned it so he could kiss the inside of her wrist. “Or maybe even she can’t be mean to someone as sweet as you.” He placed his hands on the bench on either side of her and raised himself to meet her height. He kissed her delicately on her neck first. And then her ear. “Are you this soft everywhere?”

Helen felt Tyler was wiser than the world would ever know, sillier than the world would ever see, and kinder than the world would ever feel. Because some moments he saved just for her. Dating him was like having a secret treehouse with you everywhere you went.

She felt his lips move down to her collarbone. And then her jaw, followed by her cheek and her forehead. She shivered.

The treehouse was a place where nothing more could happen, and yet she wished she could leave an imprint on this space that used to be so special in Tyler’s life.

Suddenly, a male voice boomed from below the treehouse. “Tyler! Get your ass down here!”

Tyler snorted. “That would be Leo.”

Moving to the opening in the floor, Helen looked down and saw a younger, more disheveled version of Tyler standing by the mossy ladder, peering up at them. Same almond-shaped eyes, except green.

“How’d you find us?” Tyler called down.

“How did I find you?” Leo crumpled in laughter. “You aren’t in Witness Protection. You’re in the treehouse forty feet from the back deck.”

Introductions were called out through the hole in the floor, and minutes later, Helen found herself alone with Leo beneath the tree while Tyler went to grab them ciders from the cooler on the deck.

Pulling a flask from the pocket of his baggy jeans, Leo said, “Let’s do shots.”

Helen glanced over at Tyler. He was reading the labels on the cider. “Let’s wait for Tyler.”

“He won’t want to. He thinks I drink too much.”

“Do you?”

Leo grinned and pushed his floppy hair out of his eyes. “Of course. I just turned twenty-one. Now I can do it legally though.”

When Tyler returned, both Helen and Leo were laughing.

Tyler smiled. “Did I miss something good?”

“Leo wants to do shots.”

Leo shot Helen a look: That was supposed to be a secret.

Tyler groaned.

Leo gave her another look: See? And she shrugged.

Tyler saw the exchange and said, “Are you seriously already conspiring with her? You just met her.”

“I’m a fast mover,” Leo said.

“We’re aware,” Tyler said dryly.

“I had to make my move while you were over there. It was my in.”

Tyler turned to Helen, and she could tell he was trying not to smile. “He made his move on you?”

“I wasn’t aware it was a move.”

Tyler turned back to Leo. “It sounds like it didn’t work out too well.”

“Too soon to tell. First you lay the groundwork. Then you sit back and wait.”

Tyler looked at Helen again. This time, she could tell he was checking to see if she found his brother’s jokes funny or distasteful. Did he need to stop this? She smiled at him to let him know everything was good. She could tell Leo wasn’t serious. This was his version of bonding.

She turned to Leo. “What is your success rate with Tyler’s girlfriends?”

He paused, as if momentarily surprised that she was so game. And then he answered, “One hundred percent.”

“One hundred percent what?”

“One hundred percent failure.”

All three of them laughed.

Helen said, “Just as I suspected.”

“Fine. Let’s do shots,” Tyler said.

So the three of them tucked themselves behind the oak, because even though Evelyn apparently drank too much wine according to Gary, she thought hard alcohol was unacceptable. They didn’t have a shot glass, so each took a swig directly from the metal flask, and it burned going down. The whole time the three of them talked and passed the flask, Tyler kept looking at Helen, his eyes lighting up with every sideways glance and easy grin.

When Leo lifted the flask to take another swig, Tyler reached out and took it from him. “Pace yourself, man. Gracie’s not even here yet.”

“Yeah, okay.” Leo lowered his eyes, and Helen realized he was embarrassed. Behind his bravado, anxiety was hiding.

They were still behind the tree when Gracie arrived a few minutes later. Helen looked out and saw two young women talking to Gary by the smoky barbecue. From photos, she recognized Gracie as the one with the platinum blond bob.

“Who’s the other girl?” Helen asked.

“I don’t know.” Tyler looked at Leo for the answer.

“That’s Gracie’s girlfriend, Adaline.”

Adaline was striking—tall with spindly legs and straight black hair falling toward her waist. Helen watched her reach out a long, thin arm and intertwine her fingers with Gracie’s. The two women angled their bodies toward each other.

“Wait,” Helen said. “You mean her girlfriend-girlfriend?”

“Yeah,” Leo said. “Oh, you didn’t know?” Leo studied Tyler curiously.

Tyler’s face changed. “What? Girlfriend?”

“They’ve been dating for a few months.” Leo shrugged and walked across the yard to greet them.

Tyler turned to Helen, his shoulders dropping slightly. “A few months? She didn’t tell me she was gay. Or bi. Or . . . ”

Helen understood why Tyler was upset. It had nothing to do with him discovering that Gracie had a girlfriend and everything to do with Gracie not sharing something so essential with him when the others knew.

“It’s okay, Tyler.”

He looked over and saw Evelyn talking with Adaline. “Jesus, did Evelyn know before me? Fucking Evelyn?”

Helen reached out and clasped his hand. “I’m sorry you didn’t know.”

Tyler responded with a “Yeah” that was so soft it was barely audible. He was still watching everyone across the yard, a quiet shadow in his eyes.

“Tyler, this isn’t about you.”

“What?” He dropped her hand.

“Listen to me,” she said. “Weeks from now or months from now, you can address the issue of why the two of you aren’t as close as you want. You can ask her then why she didn’t share something important with you when she’d told the others. But that’s not what this moment is about. This may be her way of coming out to you. That only happens once.”

The weight of it all took hold of Tyler, and he said, “You’re right.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” He nodded slowly. “Yeah, I am.”

“All you show her today is love. End of story. Got it?”

“Got it.” Tyler looked at Helen for a long beat, then his face melted and he pulled her into a hug. “You’re too smart. Just like the wolf in ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’” Her laugh muffled into his shirt. “Except for the eating people part,” he added.

When Tyler went over to Gracie, Helen hung back at first. From the oak tree, she watched him meet Adaline. She watched him give both girls big hugs, and she watched Gracie’s beaming smile.

Then Tyler gave Helen a little nod to join them. When he introduced her to Gracie, Helen put her hand out to shake. After the awkward hug with Evelyn, it seemed like the better option. Instantly, though, she wondered if she was being too formal, but Gracie radiated immediate friendliness, and Adaline followed suit.

Much later, as the sun began to set, Helen, Tyler, Leo, Gracie, and Adaline ended up down at the beach. Helen stared out at the water, thinking the day couldn’t have gone better. She felt the magic all around her, and she felt she’d created some of it.

Helen was no magician though; she was no puppet master. She could not day in, day out, run around casting spells and pulling strings. Over the following years, Evelyn would say cruel things from time to time, Tyler and Leo would argue when Leo got too drunk and broke something or made a scene in public, and Gracie would alternate between disappearing and reappearing. But on that day at the barbecue, Helen sprinkled goodwill throughout that storybook house, weaving the fairy-tale day she wanted for Tyler, and her tiny maneuvers made a difference.

On the drive home, Tyler said, “That’s the most fun I’ve had with my family in a long time. Did you like them?”

Helen said, “I love them.”

Chapter Fifteen

Present day

Inside their bedroom, Helen crossed her arms and waited for Wade to say something. He stood by the clothes dresser and rested his face in his hands, massaging his fingertips on his temples. The room was dimly lit by only their bedside lamps.

“What?” Helen said impatiently. “What the hell is wrong?”

Wade looked up sharply. Good, she had his attention.

“Helen” was all he said though, shaking his head almost imperceptibly. She had no idea if he was saying her name like that because she had sworn—which he hated (at least when she did it)—or because he was at a general loss for words.

She sighed. “Nobody ever comes to dinner here, Wade. Maybe you could at least aim for mild pleasantry.”

“Mild pleasantry?”

“At the bare minimum.”

He looked as if she’d slapped him across the face. She’d never seen him behave so dramatically, but she’d also spent very little time with him when other men were around, and for the first time, it occurred to her that Wade might be the jealous type.

Helen continued, “There’s clearly some tension between you two, some bizarre, passive-aggressive sibling rivalry, but I actually think he’s trying to connect.”

“That’s not what it is.”

“Then what?”

Wade hesitated, and when he spoke, it was barely above a whisper, and she finally heard in his voice just how broken he was. “It’s impossible to explain.”

His tone unsettled her. Maybe this wasn’t jealousy. But whatever it was, she needed him to come clean with it.

“You won’t believe me if I tell you.”

Helen softened her own tone. “Why don’t you just tell me and let me decide?”

Wade shook his head in disbelief, as if he didn’t know where to even begin.

She regarded him with a gentle expression. “Whatever it is, it’s okay, Wade. You can tell me.”

He looked down at his hands. “Isaac was my mom’s favorite. Not that she ever said that.”

Helen nodded sympathetically to encourage him to continue. This was possibly the most vulnerable she’d ever seen Wade, and suddenly she realized that perhaps the reason he felt like a concrete wall much of the time came down to this: He hadn’t been the favorite. He’d learned to hide his feelings, and maybe that’s why he’d never mentioned his brother. Wade had just wanted to start over where he wasn’t second place. He had wanted to trade in his red ribbon for a blue one with her.

“When Ma died, Isaac was only twelve.”

Helen’s face crumpled at the thought. She knew his mother had died unexpectedly of a brain aneurysm while visiting her sister when Wade was fifteen. What an awful thought. You hug your mother goodbye, and she comes home in a box. In Helen’s experience, unexpected deaths were the worst kind.

“That must have been heartbreaking for both of you,” she said. “At least you had each other.”

“No, we didn’t. Not really.” A muscle in Wade’s jaw tightened.

Helen thought of how Isaac had reacted to the portrait of their mother and how bitter he’d sounded when he’d asked Wade if there was a portrait of their father too.

Over the last eighteen months, Wade had made little mention to her of his father beyond the “ass whippings” he’d get if his chores took too long. His father sounded like he’d been a hard man, and she could tell Wade didn’t want to talk about him. But now she needed to know. Now they were hosting Wade’s brother.

“Were there pretty big issues with your dad?”

Wade shrugged, but she could see his discomfort. “Isaac never pulled his weight around the farm.”

One thing Helen knew about Wade: He was a hard worker, at least when it came to “men’s work”—manual labor and outdoorsy tasks. She’d always been able to envision him breaking his back on the farm, and she knew his responsibilities had only intensified after his dad had died from heart issues when Wade was twenty-two. To now imagine a lazy brother in the mix changed the picture in her mind.

“So he whipped your brother a lot then?” she asked quietly.

“No,” Wade said, and just when she thought he wasn’t going to say another word, he added in a grim voice, “He made me do it.”

“Oh.” Helen was stunned. She hadn’t expected that. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. He deserved it.”

She thought of Tyler’s younger brother, Leo, and felt the sudden pang of missing his silly jokes and shaggy hair. She couldn’t imagine Tyler ever whipping Leo.

“Still, I’m sure it was upsetting,” Helen said. “How old were you?”

“Too young.” Wade fell silent then, as if this was the end of the story. Two brothers with bad blood, but she knew there had to be more to it. He’d said she wouldn’t believe him, and while the story was troubling, it wasn’t exactly unbelievable.

“There’s something else you aren’t telling me.”

Wade hesitated only briefly before he said, “Yeah. There is.”

“Go on. I’m listening.”

“When you and I met, you were in a bad place.” He exhaled wearily. “But so was I.”

This was news to Helen. Of all the things Wade could have said, this was one of the more shocking things he could have revealed. Never would she have guessed that he was struggling with anything beyond his general weariness and irritation with the modern world. He made a show of being fine, being in control, being Wade of the woods, Wade of the right of way. She said nothing though, not wanting her response to sway him from sharing more. She simply waited for him to continue.

“When I met you, I’d just left Capichon.”

This, Helen knew. She nodded.

“In a hurry,” Wade added.

That, she did not know. She waited.

“Something happened.” He paused, swallowed hard. “With my brother.” He looked down, gathered himself. “God, it happened so fast.”

“What?”

Wade wandered to the bed and sat down heavily on the edge of it. “It was the worst day of my life.”

She moved in to comfort him, sitting next to him on the bed, pressing her lips to the back of his neck. “It’s okay, Wade. Whatever it is.”

But even as she said the words, she didn’t feel so sure.

For a long time, Helen sat beside Wade, holding him in an embrace, believing she was soothing away the pain of the past. But as the silence expanded, she began to feel more and more uneasy.

“Wade, you need to tell me what happened. Just say it. It’s okay.”

“No, Helen,” Wade said. “It wasn’t okay.”

Wade raised his head, and Helen sensed they were on the edge of everything he’d been working toward telling her.

“Wade?”

“It’s the reason I went to Seattle.” He looked at her with eyes that were lost and wild, and then he said words that seemed impossible. “I left Capichon because my brother died. Isaac is dead.”

Chapter Sixteen

Eight years, two months, fifteen days ago

When Helen planned her wedding to Tyler, she never thought they would lose someone they loved on their special day.

She was alone in her wedding dress when the earthquake hit.

Moments before the mounted lamps on the wall started to quiver, Helen spun around in her heels in front of the full-length mirror in the hotel suite. She’d chosen a timeless design for her forever dress: a corset-style bodice with a sweetheart neckline, fitted waist, and a full tulle skirt of lace-embroidered floral motifs. She felt like a princess, and in less than an hour, she’d be a queen. Or, more accurately, a Mrs.

The Pacific Northwest was earthquake country, but they were usually so small you didn’t even feel them. Helen had felt only a couple of minor earthquakes in her life, so they weren’t on her list of wedding concerns. The possibility of rain during the ceremony? Yes. The earth ripping open? No.

The wedding and reception were taking place at a sprawling two-story oceanfront inn two hours from Seattle on the coast. It was a warm and breezy August day, and they were going to say their vows on the lawn with views of the Pacific Ocean during the golden hour before sunset. Today’s sky was dotted with puffy clouds in the deep blue, and the air smelled crisp and fresh. Helen had enough hairspray in her updo that it should hold with the ocean breezes, which was important since they weren’t going to do any couples photos until after the ceremony. She didn’t want Tyler to see her in her wedding dress until it was time.

Mother Earth had other ideas though.

Helen had just sent her three bridesmaids out to check on things when the room began to shake.

Unless the ceiling caved in, there was nothing to fall from above, so Helen sat on the bed and waited. The deep rumbling sound made it seem as though the earth was groaning. The large second-story windows overlooking the ocean trembled, and just as she was starting to feel a wash of dread, it was done.

That wasn’t so bad, she thought. Hopefully the glass centerpieces on the ballroom tables hadn’t tipped over.

In a way, it was a disappointment that almost everyone Helen loved had experienced the earthquake together, and she’d been with no one. Any moment, her bridesmaids would come bursting back into the room, buzzing with excitement over it. She hoped they had thought to check the glass centerpieces first.

It couldn’t have been more than two minutes before she heard a loud knock on the door and then Tyler’s voice. “Helen?”

She went to the door and spoke through the wood, laughing a little. He must have run up the stairs and down the hall to check on her. “Honey, I’m all right. It wasn’t that bad. Is everything okay in the ballroom?”

“It’s all fine. But we have to go.”

“What?”

“I know. I’m sorry. Can you open the door?”

“I’m in my dress, Tyler!”

“Helen.” He had a strange tone, both pleading and firm.

So Helen opened the door, but she stayed hidden behind it. She peered out at him with one eye, trying to hide her hair and makeup.

Tyler, handsome in his black suit, smiled apologetically. “How do you feel about doing our ‘first look’ right now in the hallway?”

She felt a lurch in her chest. They weren’t supposed to see each other until she appeared at the end of an aisle lined with white hydrangeas as he stood waiting at the altar. Something had to be seriously wrong.

“Hold on.” Helen hurried to grab her purse and phone from inside the room. By the time she stepped into the hallway, her heart was pounding.

Tyler’s apologetic expression was instantly replaced with one of wonder as he took in the sight of her. “Oh, Helen.”

“Do you like it?” Helen said in a rush as she felt her eyes get shiny. There wasn’t time to savor it though. “Why are we in the hallway? Just tell me!”

Tyler’s eyes turned shiny too, and he took her hand. “You are so gorgeous. I don’t know how I got to be so lucky,” he said. And then he breathed out. “But we need to go to higher ground.”

“Higher ground?”

He led her down the hallway. “We shouldn’t stay at sea level after an earthquake. Just in case.”

“Oh my God! Is a tsunami coming?” Helen looked out a window as they passed by it and caught a glimpse of the ocean, its waters choppy and rippling. “Shouldn’t we just stay on the second floor?”

“Some tsunamis are taller than that.”

Helen shuddered. Memories of TV images from the Indian Ocean tsunami and the more recent one in Japan overwhelmed her.

“I told everyone to go to the lighthouse on the bluff.” Tyler smiled at her. “We’ll call it a pre-celebration. It’s just a precaution.”

Downtown Seattle was on the shores of Puget Sound, and the sound was made up of narrow inlets of water. Because Seattle wasn’t situated on the wide-open ocean, the risk of tsunamis was lower, so Helen had never thought much about them. But now they were exposed, right on the coast.

“How long do we have?” she asked.

“We have forever together. The rest of our lives.”

Helen felt the emotion well up inside her. “Tyler. How long?”

His face sobered. “If the epicenter was in the ocean, like the Cascadia fault, it could be here in under fifteen minutes.”

“Good Lord.” Helen lifted her skirt and started to jog, carefully, down the hallway.

Tyler kept a steady hand on her arm as he quickened his pace too. “I don’t want you to trip and break your leg.”

“I’ve run in heels before!”

“But have you run in a wedding dress?”

“Yes, all the times I was supposed to get married.”

They both laughed. For that brief moment, everything felt okay.

As they descended the stairs, Tyler’s phone rang, and he had a hurried exchange with his mom. “I’ll find Gracie, and we’ll be right behind you,” he assured her just before he hung up. Then he told Helen how when he’d announced that everyone should go to the lighthouse, his brother Leo had immediately run for the parking lot behind the inn where his car was parked. She couldn’t help but smile. Leo had saved up for years to buy that 1970 classic Mustang. He’d probably be the first one to the lighthouse.

They reached the parking lot and saw many people rushing to their cars.

“Have my parents left yet?” Helen asked, just as a full car stopped beside them.

“I’m not sure,” Tyler said, as one of his groomsmen rolled down the passenger window and shouted, “We can squeeze you guys in!”

“I need to find my sister,” Tyler said. “She’s running around the inn telling people to evacuate.” He escorted Helen toward the car’s back seat as he told her in a reassuring voice, “I’ll find your parents too.”

Helen stiffened in Tyler’s arms. “What are you doing?”

“Go with them.”

“No!” she said. “I’m not going without you.”

The groomsman leaned out the window. “Gracie said if the Cascadia just ripped apart, a huge tsunami could hit us any minute. It could tear the entire hotel off its foundation.”

Helen stilled, her eyes never leaving Tyler’s, and an unspoken conversation passed between them in a matter of seconds. She would not leave him behind at sea level while she went to higher ground. Never, ever.

Tyler drew a slow breath and said, “I need to get the car.” He glanced down at the four-inch heels peeking out beneath her full tulle skirt.

She felt so delicate, so useless. “Go fast.”

So Tyler told his groomsman to go ahead, then broke into a run across the parking lot. Pulling out her cell phone, Helen drifted to the lawn so she wouldn’t hold up any more people trying to escape. She tried to call her parents, but it went to voicemail. Their phones were probably on silent for the wedding.

From the lawn, she could see down to the beach. There was a man and woman building an early evening bonfire, the fresh flames and oily heat barely visible in the summer evening light. Why weren’t they evacuating? Helen’s eyes followed the edge of the sea out to a sailboat on the horizon. At any moment, a wall of water could come bearing down and swallow the sailboat, then crush the couple on the beach and sweep Helen into the deadly tangle.

She remembered the worst of the footage from the Japan tsunami—the people who walked, instead of ran, as the water came toward them. And then they were gone.

Suddenly Gracie was there, hands pressed to the front of her baby-blue cocktail dress as she caught her breath beside Helen. “Where’s Tyler? Should I get my car?”

“There you are.” Helen let out a long exhale. “Tyler’s bringing our car now, and Leo was one of the first to leave.”

“Good. Because if the epicenter’s out in the ocean—you know, the big one—we’re about to be driftwood.”

“Why is everyone in your family a tsunami expert?”

“Because they’re incredible! Tsunamis can move hundreds of miles per hour.” Gracie bounced from one foot to the other. “Shit! We really need to go.”

Helen swallowed. “Have you seen my parents?”

Gracie had not, and it added to Helen’s rising dread. How long had it been since the earthquake? Five minutes? Ten? If they weren’t going to make it to the lighthouse, she wanted to be with Tyler. She wanted to be holding on to him when the water ripped through them. The power of the wave would instantly pull them apart, but she wanted to be in his arms in the terrifying moments while they watched it come toward them.

Her thoughts must have shown on her face, because Gracie put a hand on Helen’s arm and said, “It’s okay. I was just being morbid. I’m sure there’s no tsunami.”

To Helen’s relief, her parents showed up a minute later, but then they gave Gracie some troubling news. Gracie’s father, Gary, was headed back to his room with Evelyn—because Evelyn wanted to grab some jewelry.

“He told me they were leaving!” Gracie’s shoulders sagged and she let out a bitter laugh. “That’s just like her. Jewelry?”

Tyler’s SUV came tearing around the corner then, and the mess in Helen’s chest started to ease slightly. As her mother helped her into the front seat, Helen heard Gracie tell Tyler about Evelyn’s last-minute quest for jewelry, and Tyler swore under his breath.

Once they were all inside the vehicle—Helen’s tulle skirt a fluffy bundle in her lap—Tyler shifted the gear into drive, then paused. He looked toward the inn and shook his head.

“Dad,” Tyler said, and he glanced at Gracie in the back seat.

“Do you want to check on him?” Helen asked. She didn’t want to be driftwood, but could they really leave someone behind?

“There’s no time. It’s been over ten minutes. We need to go.”

“Maybe I should run inside real quick?” Gracie said.

“No, Dad knows he needs to get out of here. There’s more than one parking lot. They could have left from the back, and we didn’t see it,” Tyler said, but the worry was plain on his face. “We have to go.”

Just as Tyler let his foot off the brake, Helen shouted, “There they are, there they are!”

Gary escorted Evelyn out of the inn. Her hand was tucked in his arm, and they weren’t walking with much urgency. Evelyn was apparently too elegant for urgency.

In a flash, Tyler was out of the SUV, opening the back hatch, and Helen heard him say, “Get in.” She spun around in her seat in time to see him shove aside a box and some sports gear as Gary climbed into the cargo space.

“The luggage compartment?” Evelyn said, incredulous.

Tyler took Evelyn’s arm, and she made a little huffing sound but didn’t protest further as she let him help her into the back.

Moments later, Tyler accelerated out of the parking lot, racing toward the nearest bluff where the red and white lighthouse stood tall. To Helen, who calculated everything in her head by how long it would take to jog there, it looked like it was about three miles away.

“Hold tight, Evelyn!” Tyler said, and if Helen wasn’t feeling a sense of mounting fear, she would have found the whole thing amusing.

The road to safety paralleled the coast for what felt like an endless stretch. It wouldn’t turn to higher ground until just before the lighthouse. Several cars in front of them were speeding down the coastline too.

Helen stared out the window at the expanse of blue. How ironic that something as beautiful as the ocean could bring such a feeling of tranquility on its best day and be so destructive on its worst.

“Really, wouldn’t the sirens be going off if a tsunami was coming?” Evelyn said, implying that Tyler could slow down.

“Do you really just want to hope the emergency systems are working today?” Tyler said.

Evelyn sniffed. “I guess not.”

“Corner!” Helen called out just before Tyler rounded a bend.

Evelyn let out an undignified squeal, and Gary murmured something to her in a soothing tone.

“No news yet,” Gracie announced. She was looking down at her phone. “I’m trying to see if the epicenter was in the ocean.”

“How long has it been?” Helen peered ahead—When would the land start to rise in elevation?!—but it was still flat all the way to the next bend.

“We’re good,” Tyler said.

“Twelve, thirteen minutes, you think?” Gracie said.

Suddenly, the car in front of them slowed to a stop.

Helen’s mom leaned forward. “What’s happening?”

“There’s some people leaving a driveway up ahead,” Tyler said. “They’re letting them in.”

“Go around in the other lane,” Gracie said.

“No, it’s a blind corner,” Helen said. “We don’t want a head-on collision when we don’t even know if there is a tsunami.”

It was true, they didn’t know. But there might be one, and now they were stalled in the danger zone. So she turned to Tyler and took his face in her hands. She planted her lips on his mouth and kissed him deeply. She felt him melt into her, and then she released him.

“Just in case we die,” she said. “I wanted our last moment to be kissing.”

“Helen!” her dad said, exasperated. “We’re not dying.”

The car in front of them finally pulled forward, and they started to move again too. “But if we did,” Tyler said with a smile, “I’d now die happy.”

And Helen smiled too.

“Heavens, Gary,” Evelyn said. “Why don’t we ever kiss like that?”

The whole car erupted in laughter. When Evelyn wasn’t being annoying, she could be quite funny.

Around the bend, the land rose steeply, and the road led them to the bluff. As the SUV climbed higher, Helen felt her body relaxing. They were running from a tsunami that might not exist, but if it did, they had now outrun it.

Then Tyler’s phone rang.

He answered it on the SUV’s speakerphone, and his mother’s panicked voice filled the space: “Where are you?”

“We’re safe, Mom,” Tyler said in a soothing tone. “I have Gracie. We’ll be there in thirty seconds.”

“Do you have Leo?”

“Leo?” Tyler leaned closer to the dashboard speaker. “I thought you said Leo left first.”

“That’s what everyone said. But he’s not here,” his mother said, her voice rising. “Something must have happened to him!”

Tyler’s face paled as his gaze met Helen’s. She could tell they were having the same thought.

“The Mustang,” Helen said quietly. It had been restored, but the starter had given Leo issues more than once.

Tyler nodded gravely at her and said, “Mom, did you call him?”

“He’s not answering.”

They pulled into the parking lot of the lighthouse, and Tyler stopped the SUV right inside the entrance. The lighthouse stood tall and proud on the bluff. The people that Helen had expected to see at the wedding were beneath it, clustered on the grass.

“I’ll go back for him,” Tyler said, loud enough for the entire car to hear, but he was looking only at Helen.

She shook her head. “It’s been too long.”

Tyler’s face crumpled at her pleading tone.

She reached for his hand. “If you’re going, I’m going.”

Nobody else was moving to exit the car. Helen could feel everyone’s eyes on them, worried and waiting. Tyler blinked hard, his jaw tightening. There was no talking Helen out of it, so either he stayed here, or he went back for Leo with her.

Evelyn broke the silence. “Would you please open the hatch? I can’t breathe back here.”

Tyler pushed the button to pop the hatch and said, “Can everyone get out, please? We need to hurry.”

Helen gave her parents in the back seat a brave smile. “I love you. We’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“Helen,” her mom said. “Just let Tyler go get him.”

“It’s my wedding, Mom. This is what I’m doing.”

Gracie burst into tears and opened the back door. She practically tumbled onto the pavement and into her mother’s arms, who was rushing up to meet the SUV.

Gary, who hadn’t yet moved from the luggage area, spoke up. “Son, there’s no way I’m letting you go back. You and Helen stay here. I’ll get Leo.”

Tyler spun around in his seat and looked at his own dad as Helen’s dad chimed in, “We’ll go too.”

“There’s no reason for everyone to go back down there,” Tyler said.

Suddenly, they all froze as a loud sound exploded outside: a drawn-out, brassy screech.

“What is that?” Helen gasped. “Is that the sirens?”

As she looked at Tyler, she pressed a shocked hand over her mouth. If the tsunami sirens were going off, did that mean it was already too late?

Tyler threw open his door and stepped out, listening. His face changed as he realized what he was hearing. Helen craned her ear and recognized it for what it was too. An approaching car was laying on its horn, and it didn’t sound like a regular car horn. It sounded like a vintage muscle car. Tyler and Helen locked eyes, hopeful.

A moment later, Leo’s Mustang peeled around the corner and screeched into the parking lot, stopping several feet from Tyler.

“Thank God!” Tyler said.

Helen jumped out of the passenger seat and reached the Mustang in time to see Tyler give Leo a little shove, then pull him in for a hug.

“Where were you?!” Tyler said.

Leo was in his best man suit, and the sight of the two brothers fiercely embracing in their formal wear made Helen’s heart trip. As Tyler released the hug, Leo gestured to the passenger side. Through the windshield, Helen saw a cute blond woman sitting inside the Mustang.

“I saw this girl down on the beach.” Leo grinned. “I felt it was my duty to inform her of tsunami protocol and whisk her away to safety.”

Leo threw his arm over Helen’s shoulder and apologized for scaring her. “Did you think you lost me?”

“We did lose you!” Helen said. “No one could find you!”

“Only for a minute. And it was for a good cause.”

After Leo let go of Helen, she wrapped her arms around Tyler’s neck. “Your brother kills me!” she murmured in Tyler’s ear, and he put his head on her shoulder and laughed.

Gracie punched Leo in the arm, then hugged the blond woman from the beach as she climbed out of the Mustang. The rest of the family and the wedding guests began to gather around Helen and Tyler. Everyone was still flushed and worried about a tsunami, but now that they were all together and safe, there was a special aliveness among the group.

As they moved to the edge of the bluff and stared out at the water expectantly, Tyler stood behind Helen and pulled her against him. His body, the sturdy frame. Hers, the perfect painting. With the others, they watched and they waited.

In the end, the earthquake was farther inland, not out in the ocean. There was no tsunami. There was just a bunch of their loved ones gathered at the lighthouse. The wedding photographer was there as well, and the photographs from the lighthouse ended up being some of Helen’s and Tyler’s favorites of the day. Every shot was full of so much love and laughter and relief.

When Helen later sent out the thank you cards, the front of them read: We survived a tsunami that didn’t happen.

She planned to do something funny with a tsunami theme for their tenth wedding anniversary.

Sadly, Helen and Tyler weren’t destined to make it to their tenth anniversary, but together, they shared eight and a half years of inside jokes. And when they hit a rocky patch in the middle of their marriage, when Helen felt lonely and adrift for the better part of a year, in many ways it was their inside jokes that saved them.

Laughter was the lighthouse that always led Helen home.

She never anticipated the lighthouse would one day burn out.

Chapter Seventeen

Present day

It felt almost like a fog rolled into the room, making Wade’s words indistinct and without meaning. For several long moments, Helen stared at him before finally finding the ability to question him.

“What are you even saying, Wade? What do you mean, ‘dead’?”

“I mean exactly that. My brother is dead.”

She made a sound of disbelief and flung her arm in the direction of the kitchen. “He’s out there.”

“Something is out there.”

“Something? Is that not your brother? Is someone posing as him?” She’d seen movies where long-lost family members showed up after many years of being gone, only for it to be an impostor trying to con the family. But if Wade’s real brother was dead, why would Wade even let this man claiming to be Isaac join them for dinner? Why were they just sitting here on the bed while the impostor was alone in her kitchen?

“No, it’s him,” Wade said. “That’s Isaac.”

“Okay, so he is your brother then,” Helen repeated, trying to comprehend his meaning.

“Looks like him, talks like him. I mean, it’s definitely him,” Wade said, then shook his head in dismay. “But I’m telling you, Isaac is dead.”

“If he’s dead, why’d you just sit there eating dinner with him?”

“I’m in shock. I don’t know what to do.”

“How did he die?”

Wade’s mouth settled into a grim line. “I really don’t want to talk about it.”

“You really don’t want to talk about it?” Helen repeated. “Oh, we’re talking about it, Wade. Right now. Talk.”

“I mean, I don’t want to talk specifics. It was a tractor accident on the farm, and I witnessed it, and it was horrible. I’ll never get the images out of my head.”

Helen softened a little as she read the trauma on his face. It appeared her husband was also the keeper of nightmarish memories, and all this time she’d never known. But still, the disturbed look in his eyes couldn’t convince her the man in her kitchen was dead.

“Wade, no,” she said, soothing but firm. She had been trying to summon the ghost of her late husband for almost two years to no avail. She was fairly confident at this point that the dead didn’t haunt the living; the living haunted themselves.

“Yes, Helen. He’s dead.”

“You must be wrong. He must have survived whatever accident you witnessed.”

“He was practically cut in half.” Wade shuddered at the memory.

Helen imagined the man in her kitchen lying in a field of wheat, cut cleanly in half, two separate pieces. Legs and pelvis scattered five feet away from his chest and head. This was too much.

She burst out laughing and stood, wanting to be away from Wade. “Why are you saying this? Why are you even saying things like this?”

“Because it’s what happened.”

“He must have been hurt bad, and you left town. So you don’t really know!”

Wade stood and rested his hands on Helen’s shoulders, stilling her. “I stayed for a week. We buried him.”

“Like, in the ground?”

“In a casket, in the ground. Dirt on top. A big fat eulogy. All of it. And now I need to figure out what to do.”

He stepped away from her, crossing his arms, and stared at a point on the wall behind her. It was a posture she’d seen many times when he shut her out to sift through something on his own.

The bedside lamps flickered, and Helen thought of the flash of the disheveled woman she had seen standing in the kitchen. So unnerving, but really, that was just another example of how one’s mind could play tricks on itself. Wade’s mind was the one breaking down this time though.

“Can we back up?” she asked. “I know you don’t want to talk about the accident, but I need to know.”

Wade exhaled but otherwise didn’t respond. She wasn’t sure if he was so deep in thought that he hadn’t really heard her or if he was just ignoring her.

“Wade, I’m sure it was traumatic. Very traumatic,” she said softly, knowingly. “And as we know, the mind will do all kinds of things to deal with trauma.”

“Helen, stop.” He still wasn’t looking at her.

“You must have been so traumatized to see him hurt badly that you imagined he was dead. Those delusions, those scenarios, can feel real.”

Wade finally looked at her. “It is real. He’s dead, Helen. Dead. And I can’t hear myself think with you talking!”

It was unlikely that Isaac could hear them speaking behind their closed bedroom door, down the hallway and around the corner, but Helen didn’t want to take any chances. She lowered her voice, hoping it would encourage Wade to do the same. “Wade,” she said. “I get it—you don’t want to talk about it. But this is my house too, and I’d like to talk about the strange man who’s in my kitchen if you don’t mind. Can I be part of the conversation?”

“Fine. What?”

Helen took a moment to calm herself so her next words wouldn’t sound accusatory. “The mind will do all kinds of things to try to cope,” she said in her gentlest tone. “Trust me, I understand what that feels like.”

“I can tell the difference between what’s a delusion and what’s real,” Wade snapped.

That stung. Had he meant it with implication? As in, I am not someone who could go crazy. You are. She wasn’t sure, but when she spoke again she knew she sounded small. “Okay, you think you can, but when you’re in the middle of it, when your mind is doing things to you, it’s hard to tell the difference.”

Suddenly, there was a knock on the bedroom door.

Alarmed, Wade held up his hand. Then he mouthed, “Isaac,” as if she didn’t know.

Another knock. Helen blinked slowly at Wade. This was preposterous.

She whispered, “He knows we’re in here.”

Through the door, Isaac’s voice reached them. “Hey guys, sorry to interrupt.”

“It’s okay,” Helen called back.

She hadn’t meant her words as an invitation, but the door swung open then, revealing Isaac.

She was surprised by the feeling of apprehension that rippled through her.

According to Wade, she was staring at a dead man.

Chapter Eighteen

Isaac propped his arm above his head and leaned into the doorframe. “I had a long day traveling. I don’t want to be presumptuous, but is it okay if I crash here for the night?”

He looked as alive to Helen as any breathing man she’d ever seen.

“Of course it’s okay,” she said. “I’ll show you the guest room.”

Isaac nodded graciously and stepped back into the hallway. As she followed him out the door, Wade shot her a look.

Helen led Isaac down the hall, back in the direction of the living room and into a darkened guest bedroom on the opposite side of the hall from Helen and Wade’s room. The guest room had no electricity wired into it, and it held a queen-size bed, a small dresser, and a wooden desk and desk chair. A notebook, pencils, several candles, and a box of matches sat on top of the desk. Next to the desk, there was a narrow clothes closet.

Helen didn’t know why Wade had even brought an extra bed here. Last month, she had put forward the idea of hosting her parents for Christmas—Someone should use the bed, right?—but Wade had said it was a bad idea. Her parents would be bored, and she’d have to entertain them the entire time. “Maybe we should spend Christmas in Seattle then?” she’d suggested. She hadn’t really wanted to go to Seattle. The idea of returning to the city was too overwhelming, but she thought the suggestion might push him to reconsider letting her parents spend the holidays with them. But he’d just scoffed and said, “Why would we want to spend the holiday in a city full of smog and crime?”

Helen felt she was the rightful owner of any feelings about crime in that city, and if anyone had the right to resist returning there for that reason, it was her. Sometimes it seemed Wade wasn’t even aware of the words he spoke.

So she really wasn’t sure who this guest bed was for then. She often considered sleeping in it herself, but she suspected that would upset Wade. So every night the guest bed sat empty, with the pretty pink and yellow quilt tucked neatly at the corners.

Helen struck a match and lit the largest of the candles.

“The bedding is clean, but . . .” She trailed off. “I should change out the top blanket.”

“Why?” Isaac seemed genuinely curious.

She gently hit her hand on the top of the quilt, and in the candlelight, little dust bunnies rose up.

“Oh, that’s fine,” he said. “I’ve been sleeping under the stars most nights. This is downright luxurious.”

“There are extra blankets here,” Helen said, turning to the closet. “Let’s just swap it out, and if you get cold . . .”

She parted the clothing on the hangers, a jumble of extra pants and shirts, then stumbled backward in terror. A knife slashed out at her, making a terrible sound as it sliced the air. She felt it hiss by the front of her chest, its glittering blade missing by millimeters.

Helen’s teeth snapped together as she slammed back into Isaac.

“Woah,” he said, steadying her.

Heartbeat still wild, mind still racing, she shook her head. Already, the knife that had ripped through the air in front of her had turned into a shadowy and vague perception, not something truly there.

Isaac asked, “Are you okay?”

Breathless, Helen clutched at the front of her dress. No, she wasn’t. For a moment, there in the back of the closet, she had seen the masked man who had destroyed everything that fateful night in Seattle.

“What is it?” Isaac’s hands moved up and down her arms, feather light, comforting.

Slowly, Helen became aware that her body was pressed against Isaac’s, her back to his front. She stepped forward, and he let go of her arms. She turned to face him. She couldn’t explain this any more than she could explain the disturbing woman she had seen in the kitchen. Since moving to the farmhouse, she hadn’t had any hallucinations or delusions. Not since the city. And in the city, it hadn’t been scary because it had always been Tyler. The postman’s face would melt away and there was Tyler, asking her to sign for a package. Those visions hadn’t scared her so much as broken her. Yes, she’d feared the masked man, but she’d never seen him anywhere, not until the day she’d come face-to-face again with him in the flesh. But never a hallucination.

Helen reached out and parted the clothing again, and this time all she saw was the back wall of the closet.

“Nothing. I’m just a little on edge tonight,” she said. “I thought I saw a mouse.”

“I scared you when I showed up here,” Isaac said. “It’s my fault.”

“You’re right. It’s your fault.” She said it playfully, not because she felt playful but because she wanted him to believe she did.

He smiled softly as she retrieved a blanket and a folded towel from the closet. She handed them to him.

“Can I make it up to you?” he asked.

“Possibly.”

“Okay. How?”

There was no suggestion in his tone whatsoever, and yet Helen suddenly imagined herself in his embrace. She imagined herself pushed against the wall right here and now, and then she saw in her mind’s eye the time she’d had sex with Tyler in the bed and breakfast, the voices of other guests just beyond the paper-thin walls, and she momentarily remembered the way Wade’s arms had wrapped around her when he lifted her in the air in the early days and how that weightless feeling had made her temporarily forget that there had ever been bed and breakfasts with little angel statues outside the window. She imagined those little statues crumbling now, their faces and wings the first to go.

Isaac was no longer smiling. He was studying her now, as if he were aware that her thoughts were churning out of control.

Helen said, “No, I’m just glad you’re here. It’s nice to meet someone from Wade’s family. There are more blankets in there if you get cold. Where’s your stuff?”

“I don’t have any stuff.”

She didn’t know why it hadn’t occurred to her that it was odd for a traveling man to show up with no traveling bags. “No suitcase? How did you get here? Drive?”

“I’ve been hitchhiking.”

“People still do that?”

“People don’t. I do.”

“You’re Jack Kerouac.” She had no idea if Jack Kerouac had been a hitchhiker, but it seemed like a good guess for a writer of the Beat Generation. Plus she wanted to know if Isaac was well read—the first of many little tests she was suddenly prepared to give him.

“Yeah, except Jack Kerouac didn’t get mugged, did he?”

“Mugged? You got mugged?”

“It’s a good thing I had my bank card in my shoe. They took my bag. I was mugged at knifepoint today.”

Blood on a pale blue T-shirt.

Isaac continued, “You were actually the second person to threaten me with a knife today.”

A pool of red soaking into the carpet.

Isaac took in Helen’s stricken expression. “Helen, I was just trying to tease you.”

“Did it happen near here?”

“Oh.” He gave her a reassuring look. “No. It was early this morning. A hundred miles from here. Don’t worry. There’s no madman wandering these parts.”

He smiled at her, but she couldn’t bring herself to smile back. There were people who roamed this earth who would take knives to the flesh of other people, rip loved ones from each other, and all for what? Stuff. Money. Pointless, meaningless things.

“You don’t laugh much, do you, Helen?”

“I used to all the time.”

“And then one day you stopped?”

“That’s right. One day I stopped. I’ll get you something more comfortable for sleeping.”

Helen left the room. It was that, or start sobbing.

Chapter Nineteen

Twenty-three months, four days, and eighteen hours ago

Not all love stories end happily ever after.

It was the middle of a November night, and there were empty Chinese food takeout boxes littering the kitchen counter inside the Seattle apartment that Helen shared with Tyler.

In the living room, there were two empty wineglasses sitting on the coffee table. A miniature half-eaten cake was still inside the bakery box. Two forks rested nearby, white frosting hardened on their tines.

Evil things aren’t supposed to happen to you when there’s rainbow chip cake on the coffee table.

Tyler was happy, and he was asleep.

Helen was happy, and she was asleep.

Looking back on that fated night, Helen would wonder if she’d heard something and that was the reason she’d awoken. But in the actual moment, it seemed she’d simply drifted far enough out of her dream state to recognize that she needed to use the bathroom.

Oblivious to the danger lurking, she padded half-asleep out of the bedroom and down the hall. She was wearing a long pink T-shirt that said Sometimes I pretend to be normal on it.

Inside the bathroom, she filled a glass of water and sipped it. That’s when she heard a noise that sounded like it was coming from the living room. Several months earlier, they’d had a mouse in the apartment. She hoped it wasn’t a damn mouse again. She set the glass on the bathroom counter and stepped into the hallway.

There was a shuffling sound coming from the living area, and a chill moved through her body. She peered toward the hallway entrance that revealed the edge of the living room, where the carpet ended and the tiles of the foyer that led to the kitchen began.

Soft thumps, as if someone was walking on the carpet.

Helen took one careful step back toward the bedroom, caught between staying frozen and retreating. If a person were to cross the threshold from the living room to the kitchen, they may or may not notice her standing fifteen feet down the hall in the darkness. She took another quiet step back.

And then a stocky figure appeared, facing away from her, a black ski mask covering his head.

In his hand, he held a large knife. The silver blade glinted in the soft light cast from the street through the window.

He seemed to be glancing around the living and kitchen area.

Unnoticed, Helen stood motionless, in shock.

Then the masked man turned his head toward her. The dark holes of his black ski mask stared at her, inhuman.

A terrifying beat.

Life flooded back into Helen’s body as she fled down the hallway to the bedroom.

She slammed the door shut behind her, and Tyler bolted upright in bed.

“What? What?!” he said as she locked the door.

“Someone’s in the living room!”

She ran to Tyler. As she reached him, he was clambering out of the bed.

“Call 911,” he said.

Her eyes went to the bedside table. No phone. That’s when she remembered both their cell phones were plugged into the USB port.

“They’re in the kitchen.” Her voice sounded strange in her ears, like it wasn’t her own. “He has a knife.”

Tyler’s eyes flashed in distress as they both realized how very bad this was. And then the bedroom door was kicked in.

There was a moment suspended in time. The masked man stood in the doorway, knife in hand. He was on the shorter side, thick in the middle, dressed in black from head to toe.

Then Tyler moved between Helen and the man, and he raised both hands: Stop, don’t do this.

The man shouted, “Your phones!”

“They’re not in here.” Tyler’s voice, calm and placating. “Take what you want and you can go.”

“Give ’em to me!” the man said, louder now, and then he charged.

Helen let out a scream.

It happened so fast that all Tyler had time to do was reach a protective hand toward her. She heard him make only the slightest gasp, so at first she thought he’d blocked the knife with his other hand somehow. But then he swayed backward. She grappled to catch him, but he was in a free fall, and she was pulled down to her knees with him.

The man loomed over them, knife in hand, and in the dim light, Helen saw his eyeballs through the eyeholes of his ski mask. She couldn’t detect the color, but she could see the dark irises against the white, crazed and fevered.

“Please don’t do this,” she managed to say.

He stared down at her, unblinking. And then he turned and left the room.

Helen grabbed Tyler’s shoulder. “Honey? Tyler?”

He rolled onto his back, and she saw blood pooling on his stomach. He looked down at the wound, confused. For a moment, she couldn’t process it either. It felt like they were in a bad dream.

“I think he punched me.” Tyler’s voice sounded far away. “It’s not that bad.”

But then he groaned, and she saw the red circle on his faded blue T-shirt was growing, and she knew the nightmare was real.

Helen guided Tyler’s hands to the wound and said, “You’re right. It’s not that bad.” She smiled at him reassuringly and held back a river of tears. “But I need you to press your hands down here while I go get us a phone.”

The door was partially hanging from its hinges, slices of splintered wood sticking out from the frame. She went to it and peered into the hallway. The masked man had to have left the apartment, right? She hadn’t heard the front door slam shut, but when she’d seen the blood on Tyler, she’d momentarily lost track of everything else. She listened at the bedroom door and recoiled when she heard a noise.

Tyler lifted his head from the floor, a disoriented look. “Is he still here?” he whispered.

“I don’t know,” she whispered back. It was the middle of the night, so all the neighbors should be asleep, unless they’d heard her scream. But if the noise had been the man still inside their apartment, robbing them, and she went for a phone, he’d stab her too.

Tyler rested his head back against the carpet, and his hands fell limp to his sides. “Helen, stay with me,” he pleaded, in a voice that sounded weaker with each word. “Don’t go out there. It’s not safe.”

Tyler might be right, so she rushed to their bedroom window and opened it. They were on the fifth floor, overlooking an alley that faced the brick side of another building. No windows across the way and no fire escape near their own window. A silent alley that she’d always appreciated because it kept things relatively quiet for city living. Now it couldn’t feel more desolate and hopeless.

She looked both ways down the alley. Empty. No one to help them.

She swore under her breath as she hurried back to Tyler. His eyes were still open, squinting in distress as he stared up at the ceiling, and she was shocked to see that blood was beginning to spread beneath his body on the carpet.

“Tyler, I need you to focus,” Helen whispered urgently as she pressed her hands to his wound.

His eyes fluttered shut, and he let out a sound halfway between a groan and a sigh.

She touched her lips to his forehead. It felt cold. “Baby?”

Tyler’s eyes opened, but he sounded groggy with his next words. “It’s a lot of blood, isn’t it?”

She needed there to be two of her. One Helen to press down on the wound, to hold her husband, to keep him there with her, alive and fighting. And another Helen to go out and try to get a phone.

“Press here, as hard as you can, and I’ll be back soon, I promise.”

“Okay,” Tyler mumbled.

Helen guided his hands to the wound and pressed them down, but as soon as she lifted her own hands, Tyler’s went limp. A wave of despair threatened to engulf her, but she pushed the feeling away. From the bottom of their bookshelf, she snatched four of the thickest books from her encyclopedia collection. She knew it automatically: volumes A, M, P, and S.

“I love you, darling. I’m going to rest these on you.”

She laid them on his stomach, but when the pile teetered, she removed the S volume. A three-stack of encyclopedias to stop the bleeding was nowhere near good enough, but it was the best she could think of in the moment.

Tyler sighed. “I’m so tired.”

The way he said it terrified her, as if he was being lulled into a distant nightfall. How dare some monster come into her home and destroy what she held precious.

She needed a weapon. Her eyes settled on the wrought-iron lamp on the dresser. It was heavy and sharp, and she was going to bash the masked man’s head in with it. But even as the brave thought fired in her mind, she could feel her rib cage shaking violently. It was a warning from her body, but she could not afford to stop and think. Ignore it! She had to act now. Right now! She yanked the plug from the wall, tossed the lamp shade aside, and hastily wrapped the cord around its base, all the while talking softly to Tyler: “I’ll be right back. You’re okay. You just hold on and the ambulance will be here to fix you up.”

“Helen . . .” Tyler’s voice wavered. “I need to tell you . . .”

Helen gripped the neck of the lamp in both hands, like a baseball bat. “As soon as I’m back, honey.”

The day needed saving, and it needed saving right now, while she was filled with guts and rage. She looked at Tyler for only one moment—savoring his face briefly—before she stepped into the hallway.

Almost right away, her courage faltered. In the bedroom, cracking the intruder across his skull with a lamp had been a plan. Now it might be about to happen. She had never been in a physical fight before, but she’d also never had so much adrenaline coursing through her blood. She wasn’t aware of her heartbeat or her breath. All she could feel was that strange shuddering in her center, like her rib cage was made of violin strings stuck in an endless, terrible vibration.

She forced herself to creep forward, pausing once to listen. Was that a creak she heard? He might be there still, clutching the same knife he’d used to stab Tyler.

Helen made it to the end of the hallway, to the edge of the tile foyer that separated the living room from the kitchen. The front door to the apartment was shut. Did that mean the masked man was still here, or that he was gone? She was desperate for clues and signs.

And then she saw the phones! Through the opening into the kitchen, she saw them charging on the counter. She raised the lamp in the air and started across the foyer, terror mixing with her resolve. If he was hiding in the kitchen, she’d fight him to the death. Anything to get her phone.

She released a silent scream inside her brain as she burst into the kitchen, ready to fight, but she found it completely empty. Untouched, even. The noise she thought she’d heard probably hadn’t even been him. Jesus, he was gone, and she’d wasted critical minutes afraid to leave the bedroom.

Helen yanked her phone from the charging cable and dialed 911. As it was ringing, she ran back down the hallway.

“Nine-one-one, where is your emergency?”

Helen gave the address quickly, then said, “My husband’s been stabbed. He’s bleeding from his stomach . . .”

She trailed off, because she was back in the bedroom now and she saw Tyler lying there, completely still.

The operator’s voice remained calm. “Who stabbed him?”

Helen dropped the phone and fell to her knees beside Tyler.

“Tyler? Tyler!” She grabbed his shoulders, shaking him. The encyclopedias slid from his stomach and came to rest on the carpet. “Tyler, come on. You had something to tell me, remember? Tyler?!”

His body was limp.

Helen wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in his neck, sobbing. Helen’s love for Tyler was so vast that if her life were a fairy tale, the electrical charge of her heart pressed to his chest would have been enough to restart his heart.

But this was no fairy tale.

From the abandoned phone on the carpet, the faraway voice of the 911 operator drifted out.

“Ma’am, are you there?”

Chapter Twenty

Present day

Blinking back tears, Helen hurried out of the guest bedroom into the hallway. She needed to stop thinking about Tyler’s murder. She needed to focus on getting the current situation under control, getting Wade to think straight.

As she pulled the door to the guest room shut, a framed picture on the wall in the hallway fell to the floor. It was the photograph of Wade’s mother, the one he’d brought into the kitchen during dinner. It had still been propped beneath the table when Wade had ordered her into the bedroom to hold a conference about dead brothers. Isaac must have noticed the gap and the empty nail on the wall and returned it to its spot.

As Helen bent to retrieve the portrait, she considered the face of the woman who would have been her mother-in-law had she still been alive. Wade felt this woman had loved Isaac more than she’d loved him. Without siblings herself, Helen had no idea what that felt like or if it was a reasonable feeling or not.

She lifted the framed photograph, lining the mounting bracket up with the nail, and as she stepped back, she saw in the reflection of the glass that Isaac was standing directly behind her.

Her heart leaped.

She spun around.

No Isaac. No one was there.

Helen looked back at the picture. The glass was clear.

She had to pull herself together. Falling apart took little energy but putting oneself together required so much more than she had. Best to avoid it entirely. The day had been painful; her unanswered plea to Tyler had almost broken her. Killing a bird had oddly saved her from the worst, but the sadness of it had also fractured her further, if that was even possible. Agnes’s visit had temporarily helped to bring her back to baseline, but then things had unraveled again this evening. The initial panic of Isaac’s unexpected arrival had caused more stress. Then Wade’s tense behavior and bizarre declaration that Isaac was dead magnified the stress. It was too much. Anyone—even a happy, healthy person—would be bent into strange shapes from a day like this.

She just needed to calm herself, and then she could help Wade calm down too.

Helen took a few deep breaths, and she heard Edgar Allan Poe’s words in her head: I stand amid the roar of a surf-tormented shore, and I hold within my hand grains of the golden sand.

She repeated the lines of poetry in her head several times as she breathed deeply. There was no unkempt woman in the kitchen, there was no masked man in the closet, and Isaac was not a dead man. There was just the roar of the shore and the sand in her hand.

She was fine.

Wade would be fine.

It was October, and next would come November, and then December, and she would turn thirty-four and the sun would continue to shine and the coyotes would continue to whine. Yes, indeed.

Helen entered their bedroom and found Wade pacing. He stopped, hands on hips, and looked at her expectantly. “What happened?”

“Nothing happened. He’s about to go to sleep.”

Wade shook his head in disgust. “Sleep. That’s funny!”

She was not going to let Wade penetrate her calm. I stand amid the roar of a surf-tormented shore. She crossed to the dresser and knelt to get into the bottom drawer, where she would find spare pajamas for Isaac. She pushed aside the stack of letters and cards from Tyler’s family that she’d tied together with blue yarn. Helen occasionally wrote back, but really, what did she have to say? The green beans are ready to harvest. Wade was quiet at dinner. Besides, she knew they were just sending letters out of pity.

Helen found the cotton shirt and pajama pants she was looking for, and when she turned back around, Wade gestured at the bed. “Can you sit for a minute?”

She didn’t feel like talking with him in his current state, but she sat on the edge of the bed, the pajamas in her lap, and waited for him to say something. Instead, he resumed pacing.

She watched him tread back and forth. “What are you doing?”

Without breaking pace, Wade said, “I’m working on a plan.”

“What exactly am I doing then?”

“Waiting here while I figure this out.”

“Would you like to know what I think about all this?”

“Not right now.”

Helen stood. “Okay. Then I’m going to bring him pajamas.”

She left before Wade had a chance to reply.

The guest room door was barely cracked and Helen pushed it open, revealing Isaac inside, sitting atop the bed with his back to her, shirtless.

“Oh” was all she said.

Isaac stood and turned to face her. She took in the large horizontal scar across his torso. Smaller scars branched out from it. She stared at it for a moment, then her eyes met his. He had an unreadable expression. Slowly, he approached and stopped in front of her.

Helen couldn’t help it. Her gaze lowered again to his scar. He just stood there, letting her trace his scar with her eyes. Studying it closely like this created an almost intimate atmosphere.

Finally, Isaac broke the spell. “Are those clothes for me?”

“Yes, they are.” She shoved the clothes into his arms. “Good night.”

“Actually, do you have a book I could borrow?”

She paused, surprised. “Sure, help yourself to any book in the living room. I don’t have much fiction though. Mostly poetry.”

“Poetry is fine. Why don’t you pick something for me?”

A part of her was fascinated by the request: This man—a hitchhiker, an explorer, a rebel, a romantic apparently—was going to read one of her poetry books before going to sleep. But a bigger part of her was certain he was a liar, and he just wanted her to believe he was going to read poetry.

Nonetheless, Helen went out to the mantel above the fireplace to look for a book in the hope that he was a romantic, not a liar.

As she was considering her W. B. Yeats book, Wade appeared beside her. “What are you doing?” he whispered.

She jumped a little. She hadn’t even heard him coming. He must have crept down the hall. “I’m getting your brother a book to read,” she replied, not in a whisper.

“Okay, that’s fine,” Wade said in a level voice. “It’s best if we act normal, so he doesn’t suspect anything.”

She pressed the book to her chest, apprehension prickling on her neck.

“You go back in there and give him the book,” Wade said. “Say good night to him. Pretend you’re about to go to sleep too. While you’re doing that, I’ll pack us a bag. And then we’ll leave.”

“Leave?” Helen repeated.

“That’s right.”

“What if I don’t want to?”

“You don’t have a choice,” Wade said. “You’re my wife. It’s my duty to protect you.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Helen handed Isaac the Yeats book. He was still shirtless, the pajamas she’d given him resting on the guest bed. He’d had plenty of time to put on the shirt while she’d been in the living room picking out the book. Briefly, she wondered why he hadn’t—Did he run hot? Did he sleep shirtless? Was he being deliberately provocative?—and then she pushed the thoughts aside. It didn’t matter.

“I folded it down to my favorite poem,” she said.

“I thought you didn’t have a favorite poem.”

“Oh, well . . .” She trailed off. Isaac’s quick responses stood in sharp contrast to Wade’s silences. Helen was no longer used to this kind of banter. “In the kitchen I didn’t have a favorite. This book, I do.”

“Fair enough.”

“The biography section is also interesting,” she added. “Yeats was into the occult.”

“My kind of guy.” Isaac grinned, and it was the kind of grin that Helen felt must have won over countless women.

“Me too.”

They both laughed lightly, but Isaac’s was the sound of growing familiarity, Helen’s the sound of growing unease. Wade was in the bedroom right now, packing them a bag. She needed to go and talk him out of it, but just as she was about to leave, Isaac opened the book to the folded page and read the title of the poem aloud. “ ‘When You Are Old.’ ” He studied her for a moment. “Do you feel old?”

“I don’t feel young anymore.”

“I don’t either,” he said. “You know, you’re different than I expected.”

“You had expectations?”

“You could say I had expectations about seeing Wade again. I guess it was almost the opposite with you. I didn’t really think about how you might factor into the equation until I got here.”

If Isaac had spoken with any trace of teasing in his voice, Helen would have thought he was flirting with her, but it didn’t feel that way. His words felt serious.

“I imagine it’s pretty strange to meet your sister-in-law almost two years into the marriage.”

“A bit. But you’ve been very inviting.” Isaac looked down at the poem. “Do you have this memorized?”

“You ask odd questions.” He didn’t say anything in response, so finally Helen laughed to cover her nervousness. “Why would you think I have poetry memorized?”

“Do you?”

She hesitated before she answered. “Yeah, a little bit.”

Isaac read the first line aloud. “When you are old and grey and full of sleep . . .” Then he looked at her like it was her turn, as if it was inescapable that they were doing this together. She hadn’t expected him to take the poem so seriously, to link it to her like this.

Helen felt her stomach flutter as she said the next line from memory, eyes fixed on the wall. “And nodding by the fire, take down this book . . .” She didn’t need to look at the page, but she couldn’t look at him either. If her life were more interesting, she wouldn’t have time to memorize poetry.

He read the third line: “And slowly read, and dream of the soft look . . .”

She closed her eyes. “Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep . . .”

“How many loved your moments of glad grace . . .”

“And loved your beauty with love false or true . . .”

Helen opened her eyes because the next line was the one that always broke her a little. She wanted to watch Isaac read it.

First he read the words silently to himself. Then he lifted his head and said them while looking at her. “But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you . . .”

Those were words she’d read a hundred times to herself and thought of only one man’s blue eyes, and now another man was saying them aloud. She should make a joke and break the spell. This was too much. Reciting poetry was something that people did a hundred years ago. Except Helen was in a handsewn dress with a petticoat beneath it, and she washed the dress outside in a wooden basin as if it were a hundred years ago, so maybe they were just playing their parts well for this impromptu recital. Seeing the quiet smile on Isaac’s face, she suddenly wanted to prove that she really did know it by heart.

So she closed her eyes again and said:

And loved the sorrows of your changing face

And bending down beside the glowing bars

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

Helen opened her eyes. Isaac was waiting with a soft expression, and it made her feel exposed. She said the last line barely above a whisper. “And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.”

For a moment, neither of them spoke or moved, until finally Isaac said, “Wow, Helen. You got every word exactly right.”

“I know.” She flashed an ironic smile. “Enjoy the occult stuff. It’s creepy as fuck.”

She left before he had a chance to respond, but she thought she might have heard him laugh to himself as she closed the door.

She stood in the hallway for a short time, letting the poem fade away, trying to shake the strange feeling that was circling her again. As she started toward the bedroom, Wade stepped out with a canvas bag in hand. It was stuffed so full he’d been able to close only one of the two top clasps, and she saw the sleeve of one of her dresses poking out.

“He still in there?” Wade murmured, nodding at the closed guest room door.

“Yeah,” Helen said warily.

He took her arm and began leading her down the hall toward the front of the house.

“Wade, just wait a minute.” She spoke evenly, trying to mollify him. “I saw Isaac’s scars. He was clearly injured, and he’s clearly healed.”

As they entered the living room, she pulled free of his grasp. “Wade!”

“He’s a ghost, Helen. A ghost!”

“Ghosts aren’t real. They don’t come back to haunt us. Even when we want them to, okay? That is a man in the next room.”

Wade grabbed her arm again.

“Stop it!” Helen hissed, fighting to keep her voice down so Isaac wouldn’t hear them. “We can’t just take off and leave him in our house.”

Wade managed to pull her into the kitchen, and she managed to shove him away. He bumped into one of the kitchen chairs.

“Knock it off,” she said. “You’re scaring me.”

Wade pointed toward the hall. “He’s scaring me. And that’s why we’re leaving.” He opened the front door. “Get in the truck right now, or I will put you in the truck.”

Helen’s expression changed as she stared at him. “You will physically force me into the truck?”

“Yes.”

Helen took a step back. “No, you won’t.”

Wade dropped his bag and lunged for her.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Wade grabbed Helen around the waist. These were hands that had touched her countless times—warm, sensual, and plenty of practical touches—and now they were being used to drag her toward the front door.

She didn’t feel fear so much as anger. She struggled against him but didn’t shout, didn’t want Isaac to hear them, so it was wordless and it was red-faced as he hauled her outside the farmhouse. When she felt her feet leave the ground, Helen thrashed about and slipped free almost immediately, but he grabbed her arm and tugged her onward, down the two front porch steps. She twisted and hit him on the shoulder, hard enough that he grunted in pain. She didn’t swing at his face but a part of her wanted to, and he grabbed her around the waist again and said, “Helen, stop!” as if she were the one being irrational.

Halfway to the truck, she pulled completely free and fell to the ground. She couldn’t keep quiet anymore and shouted, “What is wrong with you?!”

Wade stood over her, breathing hard, a different kind of horror registering on his face. He knelt beside her, his aggression gone.

“Helen, I’m sorry. Are you okay?”

“No, I’m not. None of this is okay.”

As she sat there on the ground, catching her breath, it occurred to her that she didn’t really know her husband. He’d lied to her, told her that he was an only child, never made mention of a tragic accident. Behind his silences, secrets lurked.

As she looked into his eyes, she realized that if Tyler had ever told her they needed to flee because a man that appeared as flesh and blood was a ghost, she would have immediately followed him out the door.

“Everything all right out there?” Isaac was leaning against the frame of the open door to the farmhouse.

Wade’s voice was tight with anger. “Fine, Isaac. Just fine.”

Helen suddenly wanted to know which brother would win in a fight. Wade was burlier than Isaac, but she’d seen Isaac with his shirt off and saw that he was strong too. Longer-limbed and lean, but solid. A man who’d survived a fight with a tractor.

Wade touched her arm, soft and apologetic now, and spoke low so Isaac wouldn’t hear. “Let’s just go to a motel for the night. We can come back tomorrow.”

She wiped at the sheen of sweat on her brow. “I’m not going anywhere with you. You aren’t in your right mind.”

Wade lowered his head. He couldn’t argue with her on that point, and he wouldn’t force her. “I can’t leave you here with him.”

“Then I guess you’re staying too.”

Helen stood and brushed herself off. She knew the seat of her dress had dirt on it. She had felt the give of the earth beneath her as she’d fallen. This dress had been perfectly clean when she’d put it on this morning, and now she needed to wash the damn thing by hand again.

She looked to the farmhouse where Isaac still stood and wondered if he’d lingered there in the doorway and watched them struggle before he’d called out.

Helen turned to Wade. “Are you coming inside?”

In the bedroom, Helen leaned against the dresser and crossed her arms. “Do you want to tell me about the accident?” she asked Wade.

Her left arm throbbed a little from the struggle, but she hadn’t told him that and she wouldn’t.

Wade sat down on the bed. He looked defeated, as if the events of the night had wrung everything out of him.

His shoulders sank. He knew there was no getting around it. Finally he said, “There’s something I haven’t told you. But I’m afraid of what you’ll think of me if I do.”

“It’ll be okay. Just tell me,” Helen said, as if it were that simple, even though she knew from her own experience it wasn’t. If Wade knew what she’d done in Seattle the day she’d walked three blocks with a gun in her right pocket and hate spilling out of every other pocket, he might feel differently about her.

“Isaac and I didn’t get along,” Wade said. “We fought, and I can’t deny that. But I’d never intentionally hurt him. Not bad. Not in any real way.”

“Of course not. I know,” she said in a soothing tone, but she actually found Wade’s words worrying instead of reassuring.

“That day, we were on the tractor—a real big one—and an old net got stuck on the blades. We were having one of our arguments. Shouting at each other. Isaac got out to pull it free, and when I started it up again, I thought he was done. His feet got caught in the net and he got pulled in front of the tractor. It happened so fast.”

The image swept into Helen’s mind. It was a horrifying thought, and she was an authority as far as those things went. She cringed for both Wade and Isaac, and a little bit for Tyler too.

Wade dropped his head into his hands. Then he said the awful thing she had already imagined. “It was too late. I was already driving forward, and he was pulled into the blade.”

“Wade. I’m sorry,” she said softly. “That must have been horrible.”

“It was.” His voice was muffled against his hands. “It was.”

“I wish you would have told me this before.”

He lifted his head. “I know. I just never wanted to think about it again. I couldn’t stick around and work the farm, see the very spot he’d died every day. So I put it up for sale and left.”

Exhaling heavily, he turned his hands palms up, as if that’s all there was to it.

Helen exhaled heavily too. There was so much to talk about. “After the accident, what happened? Was he taken to the hospital?”

Wade rubbed his temple in silence for several moments before he finally said quietly, “No. There was nothing the hospital could do.”

She didn’t want to force him to relive it, but she needed more details to understand how he could have arrived at the extraordinary conclusion that Isaac was dead. But before she had a chance to ask anything more, Wade said, “I need to get some sleep.”

He stood and started rummaging through the canvas bag he’d packed for their escape.

“Really?” she asked, stunned by his abrupt turn.

“Yeah, really.”

“A minute ago, you wanted to leave.”

“Yeah, and you won’t. So I have no choice but to figure this out here. And I’m exhausted from this whole thing.”

In disbelief, Helen watched Wade change into his flannel pajamas and push the bag onto the floor as he got into bed.

He pulled the blankets up to his chin. “Turn out the lamp, please.”

Helen was still standing in the middle of the room in her dirty dress, so no, she couldn’t turn out the lamp and plunge the room into complete darkness. But she also couldn’t go into the kitchen and spend the night wandering around listening to the coyotes and reading poetry with his brother staying in their house.

So after a moment, she removed her dress and put on her nightgown. She would have to skip her bedtime routine in the bathroom tonight. She climbed into bed beside Wade and turned off the lamp. None of this made any sense.

Wade’s apology broke the stillness. “I’m sorry. I haven’t handled things very good, but I’ll figure it out.”

She turned to face him, her eyes slowly adjusting to the dark. “It’s been stressful.”

“That’s for sure.”

His hand found hers under the blanket. She felt the bones in her fingers press together when he squeezed too hard.

“Let’s just say, theoretically, Isaac did die,” Helen said, trying to reason with Wade by first acknowledging his story as possible. “Then he knows it was an accident. So it doesn’t mean it’s bad that he’s here. We all dream of seeing our loved ones after they die.”

Tyler. Tyler. Tyler. His name, the metronome.

She continued, “Maybe Isaac came back to make up with you. Maybe it’s a gift.”

“No, the look in his eyes when I first walked in . . .” Wade shook his head at the memory of it. “No, it was something else. Maybe he’s something else now.”

“So what do you want to do? You want us to sneak out in the middle of the night, and then what? Live in the truck? Abandon the land?” There was no way Wade would leave the land. She knew that, he knew that.

“I’ve been thinking about that.” Wade sighed in tired contemplation. “And I think he’ll find us wherever we go.”

“He only knew you were here because of the letter you wrote your aunt.”

“I never wrote a letter. We don’t even have an Aunt Sue.”

“You don’t?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?” Helen pressed.

“Am I sure I don’t have an Aunt Sue, or am I sure I didn’t send a letter I never wrote?”

“Sorry.”

“Because I’m sure about both things.”

Helen didn’t know what to say. Perhaps what was happening right now wasn’t one thing or the other. Perhaps both of them were right: Wade was traumatized by the accident and thus erroneously believed Isaac was dead, and Isaac was messing with Wade. It certainly seemed plausible that Isaac might blame Wade for the tractor accident, and his anger could be coming through in these twisted mind games.

“Maybe you should go to your parents’ while I deal with this,” Wade said.

It was the first time in the year and a half they’d lived there that he’d suggested such a thing. Helen felt a small burst in her chest—it was the little girl inside her thinking about her mother—but just as quickly, she felt the heavy weight of impossibility. She couldn’t imagine the woman she’d become showing up at her parents’ doorstep in Seattle. Was she just supposed to throw all her clothes in their washing machine and flip on their TV? Eat takeout food and carry on conversations about the late husband she wished were still here and the replacement husband that sometimes she wished was not?

“I don’t want to go to the city.” And as Helen answered Wade, she realized a part of her wanted to stay to see this drama unfold. The upheaval of Isaac’s arrival was the most exciting thing that had happened to her since her life had been resurrected into this endless winter.

Wade’s voice turned gentle. “I’ll protect you.”

After a pause, Helen nodded, and Wade leaned in closer. He wanted to kiss her, so she closed her eyes and let him. When he deepened the kiss and rolled on top of her, she opened her eyes and stared distantly at the ceiling, escaping the moment.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Four years ago

There was a time when Helen temporarily misplaced her first marriage, a time when her best laid plans for life and love crumbled into six months of sadness she couldn’t understand. She just knew there were too many nights when she climbed out of bed because she felt like crying, the painful source of unknown origin, and she went into the living room to wipe her tears in secret. And there were too many mornings when she and Tyler rode the elevator together to floors four and seven in the same office building, still at their same jobs, and he was content with that—but deep down, she just . . . wasn’t.

Helen was almost thirty, Tyler was thirty-two, and they had saved money. Buying a house was the next logical step.

So they walked through Craftsman cottages in Phinney Ridge and townhouses in Fremont, crunching on the orange and yellow autumn leaves on front porches, and real estate agents said things like “The bones of this one are really great,” and “You’re going to love this built-in pantry,” while Helen silently crunched numbers in her head. They could afford a place like this, but only barely.

Not so very long ago, buying a house together had sounded like the most exciting thing in the world, but now that it was upon them, Helen couldn’t think of anything more soul-crushing.

Helen put a mint on her tongue. The vapors hung in the air and made her nose sting. Her heart rate was rising, yet she was simultaneously exhausted, and the mint gave her a needed little kick for the upcoming phone call.

She was now a senior manager, and she even had her own office at the marketing firm: No more cubicle! Better pay! She oversaw a team of fourteen employees, and their biggest client was Boom Now Energy Drinks. The caffeinated drinks were full of chemicals, artificial flavors, and food coloring, and they had flavors in refreshing names like Passion Guava Party and Goodtime Goji.

The clock said eight minutes to eleven when her phone rang. Stan at Boom Now always called early or late, never on time.

“This is Helen,” she said into the receiver.

“I don’t have all day for this call,” Stan said. He never announced his name, as if Helen should know his disembodied voice anywhere. “We need to get down to brass tacks, Helen.”

“Brass tacks. Let’s go.”

“It looks like shit. Nobody’s gonna pick up the can in the store if it looks like that.”

It was the eighteenth can design Helen’s team had done, each new design based on Stan’s highly specific feedback.

“Nobody’s going to pick up the can at all, Stan, if we don’t finalize a design,” she said, then laughed lightly because Stan liked direct, blunt communication, so long as she let him be the alpha.

“Don’t be upset, Helen, but it’s not your team’s best work.”

“Do you have specific changes?”

“For starters, I said turquoise, and this looks more like seafoam green.”

Helen put her head down on her desk and thought, Here we go again.

Stan continued, “I don’t know what brainiac thought yellow text would look good on seafoam green.”

She inhaled slowly and said nothing, because Stan himself had suggested yellow.

“The press release is too long.”

Because he’d asked for additional information about the company to be added in.

“It reads like an eight-year-old wrote it. Okay, that’s unfair of me.” Stan laughed. “More like a nine-year-old.”

She lifted her head. I think you’d be happier with a different firm, Stan. It’s time we parted ways.

That’s what Helen wanted to say. That’s what she almost did say. But she had already talked to her boss, Darius, about saying these things to Stan. Darius had reviewed the contracts and determined the firm would have to return the $140,000 that Boom Now had already paid.

“That doesn’t sound like a very good contract,” she had said.

Her boss had given her a look, so she’d shut her mouth then.

And she shut her mouth now too and called an impromptu working lunch in the conference room with her team to discuss new ideas. During the meeting, Mariana kept messing around on her phone until finally Helen snapped, “Is that work-related, or are you texting right now?”

“Sorry.” Mariana’s face turned red, and she put her phone down on the conference table. “I was just wondering if everyone is doing costumes next week for Halloween.”

Helen blinked. “The company allows it, yes. But I don’t know about everyone.”

Mariana was a bubbly twenty-two-year-old with Betty Boop eyes, and she was dating a guy named Javier who was on another team at the firm.

Once Helen had become aware of it, she couldn’t stop seeing their burgeoning romance. The placement of their cubicles meant both passed by her office often, and she regularly viewed them through her glass wall. All their little looks they thought were so cloak-and-dagger. The way they rested their hands side by side on the cubicle wall during all-office meetings and touched fingers every so often. How they’d wait for each other in the hallway at lunchtime so they could go off together. Yesterday, she had seen them come back to the office with lollipops in their mouths. Lollipops!

Most days, Helen didn’t have time to take lunch outside the office with Tyler anymore because of the Boom Now account. Besides, they couldn’t waste their money on restaurant food anyway. They were saving up for the house. Sometimes they met on the rooftop deck for fifteen minutes with their sack lunches. The lunches were always better when Tyler was the one who packed them, but still, she was getting tired of turkey sandwiches, apples, peanut butter crackers, hummus with carrots, and snickerdoodle cookies.

After the meeting in the conference room, Helen tossed the remains of her sack lunch in the staff kitchen garbage can. Back at her desk, she saw the email in her inbox from Tyler with a link to another real estate listing, and she deleted it without clicking it.

Helen’s knee was hurting her. She hadn’t specifically injured it, but she felt the pain radiating deep beneath her kneecap on some of her runs with Tyler. And when they’d tried to hike Tiger Mountain, they’d only made it up two miles before she said they needed to turn back. She was going to have to skip next week’s Turkey Trot 5K Run downtown. The city stores were already stringing up their holiday lights, but to her it was turning into the season of melancholy.

“You should go to physical therapy,” Tyler said.

They were standing side by side in their apartment’s cramped bathroom, sharing the pedestal sink, and Tyler was spitting little streaks of red into it.

“I don’t have time for physical therapy,” Helen said. “Do you have to floss your teeth so hard?”

“What?”

“It sounds like you’re demolishing your gums,” she said.

“I’m not.”

“Flossing like that causes gum erosion.”

“You’re a dentist now?”

“No, but the way you floss is really fucking aggressive.”

Tyler looked at her and shook his head. “Jesus, Helen.” Then he walked out of the bathroom so he could finish demolishing his gums in the kitchen.

These days, Helen didn’t feel like answering her mother’s phone calls, but having a return call hanging around on her to-do list was even worse, so when she heard the ringing and saw Mom on the screen, she reached for her cell. Her mother was probably just calling to coordinate Christmas plans anyway.

But instead, her mother said, “Oh, Helen. It’s bad news. Genessa has cancer.”

“What do you mean?”

Genessa was her cousin, and Helen only saw her at large holiday gatherings, but Genessa was six years older than Helen, and people six years older than her weren’t supposed to get cancer. Genessa had been trying to get pregnant, and now she had cancer instead?

“It’s stage one breast cancer, so they can probably just cut it out. No chemo, thank God,” her mother said.

“Oh, that’s good.” Helen suddenly felt guilty as she realized that she felt just as relieved for herself as she did for Genessa. She didn’t like the idea of her blood relatives getting cancer that young.

“Have you been doing monthly breast checks?”

Helen had not. “Of course,” she told her mother.

That night, when Helen lay down to sleep, she carefully felt her breasts and her underarms, and she told herself she would check them monthly going forward.

The next month, she forgot.

And then she forgot again.

She just didn’t want to think about cancer at thirty.

As the new year unfolded, Helen tried to keep herself distracted with work. She was creating a marketing plan for a portable, waterproof Bluetooth speaker when she heard the receptionist’s voice rising in degrees, moving toward her down the hall.

“Sir! If you just hold on . . .”

Stan from Boom Now burst into her office. He was clutching a bunch of papers.

The receptionist, right on his heels, said, “Sorry!”

“It’s fine,” Helen said, but she could feel the heat creeping up her neck. “I don’t have a meeting on my calendar, Stan. Did you try to schedule one?”

The receptionist scurried out of the room, and Stan sat down in the chair across from Helen. He tossed the papers on her desk, and she saw they were the rough outline her team had created for a television commercial.

“What is your degree in?” Stan barked.

Helen pressed her tongue between her teeth so she wouldn’t grind her back molars. Her dentist had threatened her with a mouth guard if she didn’t stop. “Communications.”

Stan smirked. “That’s ironic.”

“Why is that ironic?”

“You have a communications degree, but you seem to have a difficult time communicating your ideas clearly.”

“Is there someone else on my team with whom you think you might click better?” Helen spoke with forced composure. “Perhaps I could set you up with a different point person for a while. We could try that out.”

Stan insisted there was no one else he wanted to work with, and then he lectured her for a good ten minutes on teamwork before abruptly standing and collecting the papers. “I’m glad we’ve come to an understanding. I’ll be in touch.”

And then he was gone.

Helen waited a few minutes to make sure he wasn’t coming back, then she tucked tissues in her underarms to soak up the sweat before going to her boss’s office.

“He hates me, Darius,” she said. “I don’t think I should work with him anymore.”

Darius was one of the company’s vice presidents, and he was hands-on with the clients too.

“No, Helen. Stan loves you,” Darius insisted. “He said that to me last week.”

She scoffed. “He did?”

“He just signed Boom Now for a series of three more TV spots with us.”

Her boss leaned forward, elbows on his desk, and steepled his hands beneath his chin. His face held a hint of apology, but mostly he looked pleased.

“You’ve done wonderful with him, Helen.” Darius smiled. “In another five years, you’ll easily be a VP here too.”

“What are you doing?” Tyler had a confused expression.

He’d finally caught Helen, and he couldn’t fathom why she would be lying on her back on the living room floor crying at two o’clock in the morning.

Tyler sank heavily onto the couch.

Helen sat up, but she remained on the floor. She rubbed her knee. It ached worse at night.

Every now and then, a small part of her felt hurt or mad that she could be crying in the middle of the night and Tyler had no idea. But it was just a very small part of her. Mostly, she was truly glad the concept of this darkness simply didn’t occur to him, because he didn’t move through the world with unspoken words eating at his brain and sharp edges catching on the day’s end. Sometimes Helen felt like the mast and keel careening dangerously toward jagged rocks and Tyler was the helm reminding her to pull starboard. But lately she’d stopped telling him about all of the jagged rocks because there was just too much to tell.

“I don’t get it,” Tyler said. “If something’s bothering you, why don’t you talk to me?”

“If I literally told you every thought that entered my brain, it would drive both of us mad.”

“Well, this clearly isn’t working either,” he said.

“Are you mad at me?” she asked.

“Mad? No. Frustrated, yes. Confused, yes.”

Helen took a deep breath. “I don’t think I want to buy a house.”

“What?”

“I don’t want to buy a house,” she repeated.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t.”

“Since when?”

“I’m not sure.”

Tyler lowered his head. He looked tired, and for the first time ever, a little old. Helen could suddenly imagine him gray and stooped. If only a little messenger had been able to fly down from the heavens or the future or the secret places where little messengers reside and whisper in her ear: Tyler will never get the chance to be old and gray and stooped. If she had known that right then and there, every single thing that was eating at her would have fallen away. She would have boxed up her daily worries alongside her material belongings and run away with Tyler to someplace safe, if such places even existed.

Instead, Helen quietly said, “I’m sorry.”

Tyler lifted his head. “Is this about us, or is this about a house?”

There was worry in his eyes. Helen knew she should hug him and tell him everything would be okay. Except nothing felt okay.

“It’s not about us,” she said. “It’s just—I haven’t been happy. Not with my job, not with anything.”

“I know.”

“You know? Then why are you so confused to find me like this?”

“Lately, you haven’t been as talkative or funny or . . . I don’t know. But it’s winter. It’s rainy and gray, and you’ve been busy. I didn’t think you were crying in the middle of the night.”

“Well, I have been.”

Tyler sighed. “I feel like this is a longer conversation, but I don’t know that my brain is firing on all cylinders at two in the morning.”

“That’s okay. I don’t really have anything to say anyway.”

At that, his eyebrows drew together, and she realized that Tyler was probably thinking the same thing she was. If she had nothing to say, then where did that leave them?

They sat in silence for several long moments, then Helen said, “Are you hungry?”

“No.” Another long moment passed, then he said, “Are you?”

“Yeah.”

“There’s a frozen pizza.”

She wiped her nose. “That sounds kind of good.”

Tyler stood. “I’ll turn on the oven.”

But when Helen ate the pizza, even that tasted like a cardboard imitation of something that was supposed to be spicy and tangy and just wasn’t anymore.

As the grayness of winter morphed into the soggy days of spring, Tyler encouraged Helen to talk more about how she was feeling, but since she didn’t really understand exactly what she was feeling, sometimes there wasn’t much to say. Even worse, there were things she couldn’t say because it would hurt Tyler, things she didn’t even want to admit to herself. Like how she couldn’t stand the sound of him clipping his toenails. And how when she was in bed with him, she imagined she was any other woman with any other man. She didn’t even want him to kiss her when they parted ways in the elevator. And she was bored out of her mind sitting across from him at the dinner table.

Sometimes when she looked at his face, all she felt was numb.

And the worst part was that she started to wonder if she’d always felt this way about him.

Maddie from Boom Now called Helen one morning in March and said, “Stan went into cardiac arrest at the staff meeting yesterday.”

Cardiac arrest. That sounded especially dire. “Is he okay?”

“He was out. No pulse, and one of our interns did CPR. He didn’t die. He’s still in the hospital, though.”

“Oh, thank God.” Helen wanted to ask if Stan was brain-dead, but she couldn’t think of a way to phrase the question that didn’t sound hopeful.

“He’ll probably make a full recovery,” Maddie said. “Eventually.”

“Wow.”

Maddie then informed Helen that Boom Now would like to finalize the can’s wraparound design ASAP with design #4—which Helen’s team had completed five months earlier, but never mind; Helen obviously didn’t mention that, nor did she mention that currently the team was on design #37.

Helen wrote #4 on a yellow Post-it and said, “Please give Stan our best, and tell him we hope he recovers quickly.” She searched for the appropriate words of comfort. “And that we look forward to talking to him again soon . . .” She trailed off because the last part wasn’t true.

Maddie laughed. “Sure, Helen. I’ll tell him the next time I’m sitting vigil at his bedside,” and Helen knew then that she wasn’t the only one Stan had been abusing.

When Helen hung up, she texted Tyler:

OMG. Can you meet me on the rooftop in ten minutes?

Tyler responded right away:

Yeah. Is it bad?

She felt a pang in her chest, realizing that of course her husband would assume that anything and everything she had to tell him these days was bad news. She texted back:

No! Not bad!

On the rooftop, Helen’s face crumpled when she saw Tyler walking toward her. He had two to-go coffee cups.

When he handed one to her, he said, “It’s not too hot. I checked it.”

She took a grateful drink—vanilla latte—and then said, “Stan almost died.” Tears started to spill out of her eyes.

“Oh, Helen.” Tyler put his arms around her, and she tried not to get her mascara on the collar of his gray button-up shirt. He rubbed her back, then after a minute said, “But you don’t like Stan.”

“I know. And he’s not on the account anymore. Maddie’s in charge now.”

“Oh.” Tyler stifled a laugh. “So these are happy tears?”

“Sssh. You can’t say that out loud.”

“This is all off the record.”

“I’m a terrible person.”

He squeezed her. “Our little secret.”

A wave of solace washed over Helen. She could say anything to her husband, and he’d always be on her side.

She lifted her head to look at him. “He went into cardiac arrest at their staff meeting. I bet he was shouting at someone.”

Tyler touched her hair softly. “I knew you didn’t like him, but I didn’t realize you hated him that bad.”

Helen lowered her eyes and sighed. “I didn’t realize it either.”

Renting a kayak was Helen’s idea. One Saturday morning in April, she woke up, and even though all she felt like doing was drinking five cups of coffee while curled up on the couch, a little voice in her head urged her to try harder. So she said, “Let’s do something today.”

Tyler had long ago stopped suggesting activities because she always said she was too tired.

But that morning, he rolled over in bed and said, “Okay. What?”

Helen was looking at the weather app on her phone. “It’s supposed to hit sixty-three today. Let’s do something outside.”

“Could you hike?”

She was now in physical therapy for tendonitis in her knee, and that issue was slowly improving, but they hadn’t been running or hiking together in months.

“Probably shouldn’t hike yet.” She lowered her phone and smiled at him. “What about kayaking?”

Neither of them had ever kayaked, but Tyler would have jumped out of a plane if Helen had suggested it. “Kayaking sounds fun,” he said.

And just like that, they took up kayaking.

It was on the crisp blue waters of Lake Washington and Lake Union that Helen and Tyler started having the good conversations again.

She came to understand that the reason she didn’t want to buy a house with Tyler wasn’t because of Tyler, and it wasn’t because she’d fallen out of love with him; it was because to afford it, they would need both their current incomes. If the mortgage relied on her marketing salary, it would mean she was truly trapped. The feeling of being stuck in her job had been pressing down on her, slowly but increasingly so for years, and it had sapped the joy out of her.

“I remember on our first date,” Tyler said, “you talked about not liking your job.”

“I know. I guess I just figured as I got promoted and made more money, it would get better. It doesn’t really work like that though.”

“I’ve told you to leave,” he said. “Do something else.”

“But I don’t know what else to do. Who are these people who wake up with all these dreams and a clear vision and conviction?”

“Total assholes.”

Helen laughed and looked over at him. They were in solo kayaks that day. His forearms were getting tan from their Saturday excursions on the water, and he needed a haircut. It was blowing in the wind, and he looked adorable. She had started to enjoy their goodbye kisses in the elevator again.

“You work so hard though,” she said. “If I leave my job and try something else, or go back to school, it means we’ll have to keep living in an apartment for who knows how long.”

“Oh, Helen,” Tyler said. “I don’t care about owning a house. Anywhere you are, that’s my home.”

Once Helen gave herself permission to consider the next phase of her life, she suddenly felt like she was walking around with pockets full of possibility. She didn’t feel any rush to give notice at her job, but she felt the buoyancy of new beginnings nonetheless. At work, at home, in everything.

Memories of Helen’s early days with Tyler returned to her, and she even found a note she’d written to him only months into dating. It was so full of lust and passion. She stared at the words until she could truly feel the imprint of that golden time. She realized how very wrong she’d been to mistake her numbness for life as a numbness for her husband.

One Saturday, she emerged from the bedroom wearing a crisp white button-up shirt, her hair coiled in a bun, Tyler’s reading glasses perched on her nose. She wasn’t wearing any pants.

Tyler was blending a protein shake in the kitchen. When Helen walked in, he pressed the stop button. “What are you doing?”

“I’ve decided what my next career move is going to be.”

“Is it in the adult entertainment industry?”

Helen smiled. “Close. I’m going to be a museum curator.”

Tyler nodded because that did, indeed, make sense. All those hours watching the History Channel and those winter Sundays walking through the Museum of Flight and the Garden of Glass. Helen loved going places and seeing things: zoos, bookstores, festivals. Whatever it was, she was always fascinated with the origin of it all. Their trip together to New York had been a lot less about the nightclubs and the food and a lot more about Ellis Island and the Hell Gate Bridge.

“I could take night classes at U-Dub, get my history degree, and between that and my communications degree, I’d be highly qualified to take over the museum world.”

“You would.”

She went to him and put her arms around his waist.

He looked down at her bare legs. “Are you going to wear pants when you run these museums?”

“During visiting hours, yes. After hours, when all the exhibits come to life and you come in to see me, no pants.”

Tyler lifted Helen and set her on the counter. “What kind of things will you do to me after hours?”

She whispered to him the things she’d do.

Then she unzipped his pants and showed him.

That summer, Helen started a class at the University of Washington in comparative colonialism. It was an evening class on Mondays and Wednesdays, and she had purchased a parking pass, but Tyler insisted on driving her that very first night.

As the car idled in the drop-off area by Red Square, he said, “I’ll pick you up at eight.”

“I’ll be so much smarter by eight.”

“Even smarter?” Tyler said. “God, save me.”

Helen leaned across the front seat and hugged him.

“Thank you,” she said softly. She wasn’t just talking about the ride.

Helen learned more about enduring love in that year than she did in the years that preceded or followed it. Just when she thought she’d ruined her marriage, she breathed a little life into it and watched it come back alive, brighter than before.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Present day

It was a night without coyotes or owls. Soundless almost. Helen slept in fits and bursts, but she never left her bed to wander, because there was a mysterious man down the hall.

At five o’clock in the morning, she got up to use the bathroom.

En route, she paused in the hallway outside the guest bedroom. It was terribly intrusive—she knew that—but the evening events had felt so surreal, she almost wondered if it hadn’t all been a fever dream. She carefully cracked the door and peeked inside. The blankets on Isaac’s bed were messed up, and he’d slept with the dusty pink and yellow quilt. The fresh blanket she’d given him sat neatly folded on the desk.

Isaac was not in the bed though.

Helen shut the door so delicately that the click of it was almost silent. Then she heard the crackle of the fire and saw the faint glow of light spilling into the hallway.

In the living room, she found Isaac sitting in her reading chair in front of the fireplace with her Edgar Allan Poe book open in his lap. It appeared he truly did like poetry after all. Then she noticed which poem he was reading: “A Dream Within a Dream.” Strange, she thought. Those were the same lines she’d repeated in her head last night to calm herself. I hold within my hand grains of the golden sand.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” she said. She hugged her arms to her chest, feeling exposed in her wispy nightgown, wondering if he could see the outline of her breasts in the shimmering firelight.

He nodded at the fire. “Hope you don’t mind. I can chop you more wood today.”

“No, it’s fine.”

“Why are you awake?”

“It happens a lot. I’m never going to win any sleep awards. Whereas Wade can sleep through anything. Even when he’s upset.”

“Is he upset?”

“No, he’s fine.”

“You don’t have to lie for him. I haven’t always been the best brother.” Isaac picked up a blanket from the basket next to the chair and offered it to her. “Do you want me to make you some tea?”

Surprised by the offer, Helen shook her head. “No.” She took the blanket. “Thank you.” She wrapped it around herself. “Can I ask you a question though?”

“If you sit down.”

She sat in the rocking chair opposite him. “When was the last time you saw Wade?”

“Maybe a week before he left. He didn’t even say goodbye. None of us knew he was leaving.”

“Do you mind if I ask about your scar?”

“It healed up pretty nasty, huh?”

“No, it’s not that noticeable,” she said.

Isaac made an expression that said he knew otherwise.

“I mean, it’s not that noticeable when you’re wearing a shirt,” she said.

A smile spread across his face. “I think you just made a joke, Helen.”

She smiled softly. “How did you get the scar?”

“Minor farming accident, and let’s leave it at that.”

She nodded. It seemed like confirmation enough that Wade was wrong about the extent of Isaac’s injuries.

“So what about you and Wade?” Isaac asked. “What’s your love story?”

“Our love story? We met in the city. He wanted to buy land and move away, and three months later, he did and I went with him.”

“Sounds pretty spontaneous.”

“It was. I met Wade during a difficult time in my life. There were things I needed to get away from, and he had this idea of simple living.” Helen shrugged. “I guess I just wanted to start over. I guess it sounded romantic.”

“Is it?”

The silence that followed his question spoke volumes. Helen knew she should say something, put an appropriately positive sheen over the top of her marriage story, but she didn’t. Instead, she looked at Isaac for a long moment and then stood.

She said, “I should try to get a couple more hours of sleep.”

Isaac nodded and his eyes returned to the Poe book in his lap. They stayed there while Helen folded the blanket, and they stayed there while she put it away in the basket. She knew he wasn’t really reading the words on the page though. He was just pretending.

She knew this because the entire time, out of the corner of her eye, she watched him watching her out of the corner of his.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Helen rolled over in bed, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, surprised by the glimmer coming through the sheer bedroom window curtains. Surprised to find herself alone. The clock said six minutes past ten o’clock. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept in that late. She pulled a light sweater on over her nightgown.

In the bathroom, she saw the towel she’d given Isaac was draped over the side of the tub. She touched it. Still damp.

Farther down the hall, she found the door to the guest room ajar and the bed made. The corners of the quilt weren’t tucked as precisely as they had been before Isaac had slept in it, but his effort was obvious.

In the kitchen, she looked out the window and saw Wade’s truck was gone. She opened the refrigerator, and it appeared as though nothing was missing from inside. She wondered if Wade had taken any food with him for lunch. In the sink, there was one bowl filled with milky water and a little dried oatmeal crusted on the rim. A single spoon lay next to it.

Helen walked back to the guest room and sat down on the edge of the bed. It creaked under her weight, and she imagined it had made that same sound whenever Isaac had turned over in the middle of the night. The pajamas she’d given him were folded neatly on top of the desk next to the Yeats book, the candles, and the clean blanket he hadn’t used.

The house lay still as a cemetery, her head silent as a grave.

Helen sat there for a long time, longer than she would have guessed if anyone had been there to ask her how long she stayed on the bed. There was no clock in the room and no other way to mark time: no television in the corner streaming shows in thirty-minute intervals, no speakers playing songs in four-minute chunks, no downtown bus rumbling by on a set schedule. She was on forest time, and she was alone again.

It seemed Isaac had continued on his way without saying goodbye. Time was rolling by without her, and it had carried away last night’s mysterious trespasser. If she’d been able to see him off this morning, she wondered if they would have embraced—and if they had, would they have A-framed their bodies to keep an appropriate distance tented between them or would she have been unable to resist the longing to crush herself fully against him? He must be on the road right now, on to his next adventure.

Well, none of that mattered now. Isaac had arrived and been witness to one uncomfortable episode after another. It was for the best that he was gone and she didn’t have to look him in the eyes as she wished him well. She’d rather not endure yet another goodbye in her life, which had turned into a series of strange goodbyes. Things were back to normal. Maybe Wade would be able to think more clearly now, let go of his outrageous idea that Isaac was dead.

Helen stood and collected the worn pajamas. She brought them to her face and inhaled, but she detected no lingering scent. Good, she wouldn’t need to wash them. Wade could wear the same pajamas his brother had worn for one night.

She carried them to her bedroom. Before putting them away in the dresser, she breathed in one more time, just in case—but there was only the faint smell of soap. She ignored the feeling that passed quickly through her, refused to acknowledge it as disappointment.

Back in the kitchen, Helen noticed an envelope on the side table with her name scribbled across it.

She opened it, thinking it was from Isaac, but then realized it was Wade’s writing, scrawled so sloppily she almost didn’t recognize it.

As she read the note, the alarm swelled inside her.

Helen, I’m taking Isaac with me to work the trees. I’m going to take him deep into the woods and make sure he never comes back. Don’t worry. You and I will be safe.

Helen rushed into the living room and snatched the small wooden box from the mantel. She fumbled it open. The revolver was gone.

She ran outside into the yard and spun in a desperate circle, looking as far as she could see. There were trees in all directions for miles. She didn’t have a vehicle or even a bicycle. She could spend the entire day roaming the woods on foot and never find them.

It was too late. She had let things get out of control. Of course, she realized Wade had been saying and doing crazy things last night, but it hadn’t really seemed all that crazy within the context of her own experiences. Her mind had temporarily escaped the confines of reality after Tyler’s death, had even turned dark and violent corners, but she thought Wade just needed time. This was his own brother, not a masked murderer. She had never suspected that Isaac was in danger.

She didn’t know where they were, but she had to do something.

Helen ran back inside and went down to the cellar where she set up the burning candles around Tyler’s photo. She made her plea again, but this time it wasn’t just for herself: “Tyler, I need your help! Not just me, but someone else needs help, and I don’t know what to do. Send me a sign. I can’t do this alone.”

Her eyes searched the cellar, willing Tyler to appear. When he didn’t, she screamed his name, but it was futile. She dropped her head and closed her eyes. It took a while before she was able to summon the energy to blow out the candles and return everything to the box on the bottom shelf of the cellar.

Dragging her feet back up the stairs, she told herself that Wade wouldn’t shoot Isaac, wouldn’t actually kill him. No, he’d just scare him with the gun, order him to leave their property. That had to be all Wade meant by the cryptic note.

That’s what Helen told herself as she brushed her teeth and got dressed in a gray linen long-sleeved dress that was much too delicate given the circumstances. That’s what she told herself as she did the day’s chores, finishing Wednesday’s, Thursday’s, Friday’s, and Saturday’s brown bag lunches. That’s what she told herself every time she stopped in the midst of whatever she was doing and brought her hands to her face in horror. It was too much to imagine otherwise.

As the day wore on and her anxiety grew, the metronome in Helen’s mind—the usual repetition of Tyler, Tyler, Tyler—was replaced with Isaac, Isaac, Isaac.

When she finally heard the rumble of Wade’s truck just before sunset, she ran outside.

Chapter Twenty-Six

As Helen rushed out of the farmhouse, she almost tripped over the front door’s threshold. It was the same doorway she’d crossed through a thousand times before without issue, but she was so desperate to find out what had happened that her body felt both wobbly and charged, like she’d been shot from a cannon after being forced to wait all day curled up at the bottom of the barrel.

From the front porch, she watched and waited, hopeful that two men would emerge from Wade’s truck.

A moment later, her heart sank. Wade was alone. He walked unsteadily toward her, the setting sun glinting off the gun in his hand. His face was heavy and haunted. It wasn’t what she would have expected to see if he’d successfully convinced Isaac to leave without violence. It was the face of a man who was broken, completely shattered by the day’s events.

“Wade. No,” Helen said.

Just before he reached the porch, he flung the gun aside and it skidded across the grass.

“What did you do?” she said.

He just staggered past her into the house, and she let out a strangled sound, halfway between crying and choking. He’d done it. Wade had killed his own brother.

She couldn’t follow him into the house. She couldn’t bear to question him—to even look at him—but her body was trembling so badly she could barely stand. She braced herself against the rocking chair and took several deep breaths. As the evening wind started to pick up, she walked slowly out to the truck and leaned against it for support.

What kind of irony was this? The universe was cruel. Surely, it was laughing at her. Yesterday, she’d held the gun to her head, and she’d almost gone through with it. Instead, she’d avoided death to suffer this fate. Now she would have to carry the guilt of not warning Isaac that Wade was coming undone. Isaac had left her house this morning unaware that he was marching to his own death.

“Hey,” a voice said, and Helen jumped as a head popped up behind her.

“Oh my God,” she said as she looked into Isaac’s eyes.

He peered at her curiously from his seated position in the bed of the truck next to a large toolbox and some pieces of plywood.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I thought it’d be peaceful. Lay back and watch the sky and the birds overhead.” Isaac hoisted himself over the side of the truck, deftly landing on the ground. “I was wrong. It was bumpy as hell.”

He was so alive that she couldn’t help but reach out and grasp him, her fingers wrapping around his upper arm. He went still, and she released the hold almost immediately.

“Thank you for making your bed,” she said. It was the first thing she could think of to say, and it made her feel stupid as soon as the words left her mouth, as if her entire existence revolved around housework.

Isaac started toward the side of the house. “I owe you some wood too.”

Helen trailed behind him. She just wanted him in her line of vision, so she could keep confirming to herself that he was okay. For several minutes, she watched Isaac swing the ax and chop the wood. She was standing in the wide open of the yard, but he never looked at her or acknowledged that she was staring. He just let her be, as if she were having her own private moment, until eventually that started to make her feel as though they were having a shared private moment.

Helen turned away and walked to the front of the house. There, she located the discarded revolver in the grass and opened the chamber. She dumped six spent shells into her palm, and her mouth fell open in shock.

She tucked the revolver behind her gardening tools where Wade wouldn’t find it. Thank God the only other gun he owned, his rifle, was at the gun shop being repaired.

Helen entered the farmhouse, and Wade looked up wearily from his seat at the kitchen table. There was mud tracked from the door to the table because he hadn’t removed his boots.

She opened her palm, showing him the six spent shells. “What happened out there?”

“I shot him.” Wade’s tone was defeated. “The bullets went right through him, and he turned around and smiled at me.”

She shook her head in dismay. She didn’t know which was worse: that her husband was disappointed he’d been unable to kill his own brother or that he believed bullets could pass through Isaac without harming him.

Wade said, “There’s no dinner.”

“What?”

“There’s nothing to eat.”

Helen’s fist closed tightly around the spent shells. “I was a bit too worried to cook.”

“What am I supposed to eat?”

She bristled. Were they really talking about food right now? “I don’t know, Wade. Eat one of your packed lunches. Wednesday or Thursday looked pretty fucking tasty to me.”

She tossed the spent shells at him. They ricocheted off the table and clattered to the floor. Wade didn’t even flinch.

Outside, the sun was behind the trees and the temperature was dropping. Helen rounded the side of the house and found Isaac resting on the stump, chopped wood scattered at his feet.

“Did Wade try to shoot you?”

“Shoot me? What?” Isaac stood up. “No.”

“Well, that’s good at least.” Helen rested her foot on a chopped piece of wood and rolled it back and forth with the toe of her shoe. The cut was clean.

“Helen?”

She looked up into Isaac’s questioning gaze and said, “Something’s really wrong with Wade.”

“I did see him point the gun at the sky and fire off some shots. I thought he was scaring away some animals or something.”

She nodded slowly. That made sense, and it made her feel slightly better.

Isaac narrowed his eyes. “Why would you think he’d try to shoot me?”

“He took the gun with him, which he usually doesn’t do because he leaves it here for me because—well, never mind why.” She wasn’t about to explain what had happened to Tyler. “And when he came back there were spent shells . . .”

Helen trailed off, knowing her vague explanation wasn’t sufficient, but now that she knew Wade had only pointed the gun at the sky and fired, her sense of loyalty to her husband had to take precedence over his brother. She continued rolling the piece of wood back and forth with her foot.

Isaac’s boot came down on the wood, preventing her from rolling it further. “What else aren’t you telling me?”

She studied the thick sole on his shoe, the leather material, the knot on the laces at the top. Her eyes continued to drift up, past his worn jeans and the black canvas work shirt, the sleeves rolled up his forearms, until finally she was looking at his face. They were standing close together now, too close for a normal conversation. She took a step back and crossed her arms against the cool wind.

“He’s been saying some things that worry me. He seems to be under some kind of emotional strain, and I think maybe your visit triggered it.” Helen chose her next words carefully. “I think it’s guilt about the accident and maybe some resentment about past issues between you two.”

Isaac raised an eyebrow. “He talked to you about the accident? What did he say?” For a flicker, she saw defiance in him—maybe even anger—but it was gone so quickly that once it had passed she wondered if she’d imagined it.

“Not much. That you were hurt badly, and he was devastated and left town not long after.”

“That’s all?”

“More or less.”

Isaac waited expectantly, and she knew he wanted her to elaborate on what “more or less” meant. When she didn’t, he smiled faintly in acknowledgment that she wasn’t going to share and he couldn’t make her.

“I’m sorry, Isaac,” she said, “but maybe the best thing would be—I don’t know, maybe you should go.”

“If Wade’s in trouble, I want to help.”

“I’m not sure you can. And I’m not sure it’s safe for you. I think he’s having a mental health episode.”

All day something had been nagging at Helen, something dark and insistent in the back of her mind. She wasn’t sure it was an idea she should give wings to by putting it into words, but it had to be asked now. “Isaac, the accident? Was it definitely an accident?”

Isaac crossed his arms, mirroring her own stance, and his face hardened. “You’re asking me if your husband is the kind of man who would deliberately run over his own brother with a tractor?”

She’d offended him, it seemed. “No, I’m sorry. That’s a stupid question.”

“Do you think he would?”

“No.”

“Then why did you ask me?”

When she didn’t answer right away, Isaac asked, “Do you think I would just pop by for a visit if my brother had tried to kill me?”

“Unlikely.” Helen managed an uneasy smile. She didn’t want to be in this conversation any longer. “I should go inside.”

“Wait.” Isaac uncrossed his arms and stepped toward her, his eyes tender now. “I’m sorry. Your question surprised me is all. Is everything okay?”

“Not really.” They were standing too close again, but she’d already backed up the first time he’d advanced on her. It would be a strange dance if she retreated again, so she held her ground as if the space between them was perfectly normal, as if she wasn’t just tiptoes and one sway away from kissing distance. “Some of the things he’s saying sound threatening.”

“Toward you?” Isaac’s voice was low now, intensely probing.

Helen shook her head. “No, toward you.”

“Doesn’t matter what he’s saying. Wade can’t hurt me,” Isaac said firmly.

“But would he try?”

Isaac seemed to weigh his words before he spoke again. “Growing up, our parents were tough on us. How much has Wade told you?”

“Not much.”

“Some parents make their kids hug it out after a disagreement. Not our dad.” Isaac’s expression tightened. “He made us solve our disagreements with a good old-fashioned fight. Winner gets their way.”

Helen inhaled sharply. “Like a fist fight?”

“That’s right. Wade has knocked me out cold at least three or four times.”

“Oh my God! That’s awful.”

“But don’t worry.” Isaac flashed a wicked little grin. “I got a knockout at least five or six times myself.”

Helen swallowed and looked out at the forest. Forced fights, forced whippings. “Maybe it really is best if you leave.”

Isaac sighed. “I didn’t mean to freak you out. All I’m saying is Wade and I had an unusual upbringing. We’re fine though. Maybe neither of us is good at talking things out, but we’re brothers. He’s not going to hurt me.”

Helen’s eyes left the trees and found a resting place within Isaac’s gaze.

“It’ll be okay, Helen,” he said softly. “But you don’t have to take this on by yourself.”

His confidence gave her confidence. After all, Isaac had grown up with Wade. In many ways, he was in a better position to judge her husband than she was.

“When I came here last night, I didn’t plan to stay,” Isaac said. “Wade and I have some unresolved things, and I planned to take care of that in my own way and then leave. But you being here—it made me rethink my plans.”

She didn’t know what he meant by that. The truth was, she didn’t want to ask for clarification, because there was a protection of sorts in not knowing. She could reasonably interpret Isaac’s words to mean that meeting his sister-in-law had given him a renewed longing for family connection. Indeed, that’s probably all he meant, she told herself. And so she didn’t ask him to clarify just in case he was implying something else about her—about them—in case he said something that crossed a line, because then she’d have to ask him to leave right then and there. Which was a preposterous thought anyway. He’d barely been here twenty-four hours, so there was no line to cross, there was no them. Goodness, how starved was she for connection that having dinner company and discussing a little poetry with him had given her such a lift? It was embarrassing to admit, but she wanted it to continue just a bit longer.

“Do you want me to go? Or do you want me to stay?” Isaac asked. “It’s up to you.”

Helen knew what she was going to say, but she wanted to hang on to the feeling of watching him wonder what her answer would be, so she let a long moment pass between them before she finally said, “Stay.”

When the word left her lips, though, she saw it in his eyes: He’d already known.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Isaac followed Helen into the farmhouse. Wade was still seated at the table, shoulders slumped in defeat.

“Isaac is going to make us something for dinner,” Helen announced.

“Fine,” Wade said, his eyes never leaving the table.

She felt a sudden bolt of unease. This wasn’t the husband she knew. He was behaving as if someone had opened his veins and poisoned him with apathy.

Isaac was already moving deeper into the kitchen, opening the refrigerator, paying no attention to her exchange with Wade, at least not outwardly.

Helen lowered her voice, softened it. “Wade, maybe we could go somewhere and talk?”

“I don’t want to talk.” He stood and wandered into the living room.

From the kitchen, she could see him sink into the couch. She should go to him, but they’d never talked about hard things, so she didn’t know how to start with him now. Still, it was the right thing to do, so she went into the living room.

“Wade? Can I help you take off your boots?”

“No.”

A lone coyote howled in the distance.

“You don’t want to go to the bedroom and talk?” She knew Isaac could probably hear them in here.

Wade didn’t even look at her when he answered, “No, Helen. I said no.”

So she left him there on the couch and went back into the kitchen. Isaac was sorting through various mixing bowls and utensils he’d pulled from her cupboards and drawers.

“Can I help you with anything?” Helen asked.

“No” was all Isaac said, without looking at her, and it felt like both a denial and a gift.

“Okay, then I’m going out to find the coyote.”

That caught his attention. He turned his head toward her, and his lips parted slightly in surprise. After a moment, he nodded, as if what she’d said was perfectly reasonable.

Helen walked out of the farmhouse, pulling Wade’s work coat from the back of the kitchen chair as she passed by the table.

It wasn’t until she was halfway across the meadow that she realized she was wearing Isaac’s coat, not Wade’s.

Dusk changed to the early impressions of night. It had been stupid to walk into the woods without a lantern, but Helen didn’t turn back because the moon was bright, and her eyes were adjusting as the dark closed in degree by degree. She heard the single howl only once more, and she doubted she’d find the coyote or any night creatures, but still she wandered the trees at the perimeter of the forest not too far from the meadow. A sweet yet sharp, earthy aroma filled her nose. Some of the fresh foliage was already falling to the ground and decomposing. October was a battle month: new beginnings versus the rot.

She wrapped Isaac’s coat tighter around her. His sleeves went past the tips of her fingers, and the fleece lining felt soft against her neck.

Then she heard an unfamiliar sound: first a crackle, followed by a ripping noise. Something pulling, stretching, breaking. Something wet. It took a moment before she could make sense of the shadowy image only ten yards in front of her.

By a thick fir tree, a lone coyote, shifty eyes and bloody mouth, stood over the rabbit it was devouring, staring her down, like it was simultaneously daring her to step closer while warning her to stay back.

Woman and coyote looked at each other, unblinking. It wasn’t a large coyote. If needed, she could probably kick it hard enough to break its ribs. She wondered when the animal sized her up what conclusions it drew about her. Legs thin enough to rip a chunk out of, maybe.

She smiled at it, because it was wild and free and even a little bit pretty, bloody mouth and all.

Helen backed away slowly, and the coyote went back to tearing apart the rabbit.

As Helen approached the farmhouse, she slipped off Isaac’s coat, hoping he wouldn’t notice she’d taken it. When she entered, the sweet smell of garlic and mushrooms filled her senses.

Isaac looked up from the stove and saw his coat folded over her arm. The deliberate way he watched her return it to the kitchen chair told her that he very much wanted her to know that he had indeed noticed.

“Food’s almost ready” is all he said though.

He’d prepared noodles in a creamy white sauce. Helen hadn’t told him that she kept her canned and jarred food in the cellar, but he’d obviously found the preserved mushrooms down there.

She went to the hall closet to get fresh cloth napkins and the third matching blue and gray place mat. When she passed through the living room, Wade didn’t stir on the couch. He was still in the same position she had left him.

Minutes later, when she called him in to eat dinner, she was surprised that he came.

Helen ate in silence with Wade and Isaac on either side of her, each man sitting at opposite heads of the table. Wade kept his eyes down, but he ate the dish hungrily. He loved creamy pastas, and she wondered if Isaac knew that. Probably. They were brothers, after all. It was strange they were all eating together in silence, but it would have been even stranger if Helen and Isaac had been chatting amicably while Wade said nothing, and she knew that’s what would have happened if she’d tried to strike up a conversation.

The only thing Helen said, several bites into the meal, was “This is really good, Isaac. Thank you.”

Isaac simply nodded.

He didn’t say any words himself until her plate was almost empty and he asked, “Did you find your coyote?”

Wade looked up then, chewing slowly, watching Helen with a circumspect expression.

She nodded. She wanted to tell him about it but not with Wade sitting there.

Isaac smiled softly at her and then looked at Wade. For the briefest moment, Helen questioned if he was somehow provoking Wade, but then Isaac twisted the last of his noodles around his fork and resumed eating. The moment was gone before it was anything. She was probably just being paranoid.

No one said anything more, and then Wade stood and strode out of the kitchen. She heard a door open and shut down the hall.

After she finished her meal, Helen washed the dishes, and Isaac dried them with a towel. When she passed the last plate to him, their fingers brushed lightly. She wasn’t sure if it had been her hand, or his, that had reached across the invisible line.

Helen found Wade lying on top of their bed, still in his filthy work clothes with his boots on. His mouth was set in a grim line, and he stared at the ceiling like he was fixated on the cracks in the wood. She stood in the doorway, her hands still slightly damp from doing the dinner dishes, and tried not to scream. The bedding would have to be washed tomorrow.

She cleared her throat. “You didn’t take a bath?”

“You didn’t run one for me.”

Every night since they had lived at the farmhouse, Helen had run Wade a bath. But tonight she didn’t want to fill the porcelain tub for the man dirtying the comforter on their bed. She wanted to be in Seattle with Tyler catching a movie in the U District. Tyler. Tyler. Tyler.

Helen went to the bathroom and turned on the bathtub faucet, swearing under her breath. Running a bath wasn’t exactly a task that required great skill. She kept her hand beneath the water flow and adjusted the temperature until it was just right, then straightened up and turned.

Isaac was standing just inside the room.

Her breath caught and a flush spread across her cheeks. She wondered if he’d heard her swearing while she ran the water. It didn’t seem right to swear while wearing a petticoat.

“Sorry,” Isaac said. “I was wondering if there would be enough hot water for me.”

“You can have this one.”

His fingers went to the buttons on his work shirt and he undid the top one, then the next. The bathroom space was so tight that as she exited, she couldn’t help but brush her body against his.

In the bedroom, Helen told Wade, “Isaac is going to bathe now and then you can.”

Wade’s gaze finally moved from the ceiling to look at her. His eyes were still distant, but they held a note of accusation. “You ran him a bath?”

“No, I ran you a bath. And he came in while I was doing that, and he’s our guest, so . . .” She trailed off. Did she really need to explain Hostessing 101? “I’ll run a new one when he’s done.”

“A bath is the last thing on my mind right now.” Wade reached for the bedside lamp and flipped the switch, plunging the room into darkness.

She turned the light back on. “Can we talk, Wade? I’m worried about you.”

“You should be worried about both of us.”

He killed the light again, and this time Helen let him.

Isaac was bathing still as Helen put the fireplace poker back on its stand and considered her poetry books on the mantel. She didn’t want to get into bed next to Wade. He hadn’t even taken off his boots before he’d flipped off the light. Was he really going to sleep the entire night in them?

She selected a John Keats hardcover from her book collection and opened it to a random page. “I have so much of you in my heart.” Not so random after all. The page was folded down to the section with his letters to his fiancée, Fanny Brawne, a woman Keats would never marry due to his illness and untimely death. Helen didn’t remember folding that page down, but of course she must have—she was very familiar with it. It comforted her that she wasn’t the only lost soul living a tragic love story. Across the universe, there had been many unfinished love stories before hers and there would be many after. There were so many brokenhearted people walking around, thinking to themselves, I have so much of you in my heart.

Helen heard the bathroom door open. Isaac was out of the bath. She resisted the urge to inch toward the edge of the room where she could see down the hallway. Instead, she listened. She heard his footfalls whisper and creak down the hall and then disappear into the guest bedroom, the door closing quietly behind him.

Then she sat down on the couch with John Keats’s letter to Fanny Brawne.

So let me speak of your Beauty, though to my own endangering; if you could be so cruel to me as to try elsewhere its Power.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Less than two years ago

Tyler was gone. Without him, the sun forgot how to rise. Helen stayed under blankets of gray all day, waiting for the weight of it all to finally crush her lungs. But she kept on breathing, and it seemed like a cruel joke that the world moved around her like normal, while her brain was stuck in a loop replaying the same hellish night over and over.

There had been a moment when Helen had started desperate chest compressions on Tyler, but that had just pushed incredible amounts of blood out of his stomach wound. So in the end, all she did was hold him and wait for people to show up and start making impersonal, official declarations about time of death and crime scene protocol.

Grief hit her so absolutely—the instant destruction of her entire universe—that in only a matter of weeks it felt as if she had been a grieving widow all her life.

Loved ones circled and began handling things for her. Her mother, her aunt, her girlfriends—they all made “arrangements.”

Tyler’s body was an arrangement to be made.

His life insurance policy was a payment to be doled out.

His personal belongings were things to sort. Helen refused to go through his things. No, she would not give anything away! She held on to the idea that Tyler might come back and need them. She knew, logically, that wasn’t true. But she grasped onto it anyway. She slept in one of his unwashed T-shirts. Initially, his scent lingered.

She sent Tyler text messages each day:

I miss you. I need you to come back because no one understands me like you. No one hugs me like you. No one looks at me or loves me like you. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

Some days, she opened Tyler’s phone and sent herself back a reply, imagining what he might say to her if he were still alive. Then she opened her phone and read the message, pretending it had really come from him:

I miss you too, Helen. So much. I’ll find a way back to you. You have nothing to be sorry for. I’ll be there soon.

Every now and then, she actually believed the replies were real.

Helen would roll the details over in her mind so many times. The worst of it would break her apart, but the strangest things would bother her too. The masked man was on the shorter side, barely taller than her. Someone who was physically smaller than Tyler had been able to kill him that easily, that quickly, all because he had a knife. These terrible realizations lodged in the space between her sticky mind and her spiraling heart.

All day, all night, she called out to him. Tyler, Tyler, Tyler.

At first, Helen stayed at her parents’ house in the suburbs outside Seattle, but she couldn’t sleep in her old bedroom. Her childhood had been a time before she knew Tyler. Sleeping in her old room would have amounted to an erasure of him. She couldn’t explain this to anyone; she just told her mother that she’d prefer the couch. Besides, she didn’t want to sleep in any bed, because she had reverted to her childhood fears. Beneath the bed is where the boogeyman hid, and the masked man was her boogeyman.

At night in the living room, she left a tableside lamp on. She rarely slept for more than an hour at a time, rarely more than three or four hours the entire night, and her dreams were nightmares.

The days were even worse than the nights. Her boss gave her a leave of absence from work for one month (as if one month could ever be enough!), and Helen dropped out of the history class she was taking on Thursday evenings. The idea of leaving marketing for some romanticized job working at a museum now seemed impossible. She stumbled through the days at her parents’ house, wondering how she’d ever managed to chop a head of broccoli or shape her eyebrows or type an email.

Simple tasks, now impossible.

One day, she saw her old bicycle in the garage, its flat tire and rusty gears staring back at her. She’d probably been seventeen the last time she’d ridden it. She pulled it out from behind a junk heap and rolled it onto the parking slab in front of the house. She swung a leg over it and climbed on. Her feet fumbled for the pedals and then she was coasting unsteadily down the slight incline toward the street. She felt the leg of her loose-fitting sweatpants rub against the gears. A sharp, unpleasant screeching sound came from somewhere on the bike. At the street, she stopped and contemplated which way to ride. It was gray and cloudy, the street damp from last night’s rain.

“I can get that fixed up for you,” her dad said, suddenly appearing beside her. Her parents were constantly on watch, it seemed. “You can’t really ride it like that.”

Helen looked down and realized the sound she’d been hearing was the bike rims scraping on the pavement.

She slid off the seat and let her dad take it back into the garage.

Only a few days later, the bike was ready. She had no idea what her dad had done to it and didn’t feel like asking. She just thanked him and climbed on.

“Oh!” her dad said. “I got you a helmet.” He opened the door to his SUV.

But Helen just shook her head and rode away. If she wrecked her bike, she wanted to crack her head open.

She rode south on Highway 99, pedaling on the sidewalk past taverns, greasy restaurants, and a strip mall with a faded sign. All the businesses had bars on their windows, but she knew now that protection was a falsehood.

Helen rolled her bicycle to a stop in front of a gun range.

A familiar feeling swept through her. After a moment, she recognized it as something she used to feel in her past life, the life when Tyler was still alive.

Motivation. An idea. A plan.

Yes, Helen was going to buy a handgun, and she was going to learn how to shoot it with perfect accuracy.

That way, when the police caught the murderer, she could kill him herself.

During initial police interviews, Helen was able to clearly recount details of the terrible night, and when they asked her questions that required her to imagine things or conjecture—Is there anyone that would want to hurt you or Tyler?—she was able to come to logical conclusions. The short answer was no.

She also had enough clarity to recognize at one point that the police were considering the possibility that she could have been the one who stabbed Tyler. She and Tyler had watched true crime shows on occasion, and she knew the spouse was always the first suspect. She briefly contemplated getting a lawyer. The detectives wanted to know if she and Tyler had been having marital problems or if either one of them had ever had an affair. No and no. Did they have money problems or debt? No and just a small amount of student loans. They wanted to know the size of the life insurance policy. Fifty thousand dollars.

The day after those questions, the head detective sat down with her. She was a tall woman named Calhoun, which sounded like a very detectivelike name to Helen. She wished she could tell Tyler that the detective handling his case had a movie-character name and drank coffee out of white Styrofoam cups. Helen wasn’t sure how she was going to go through the rest of her life observing details like this and being unable to tell Tyler.

Calhoun told Helen there was a witness who had seen the masked man at the apartment complex that night. The witness was a bartender returning home from his late shift. As the bartender was going up the stairs, a man in a ski mask with a bloody knife had come running down them. The bartender had immediately called 911 from his apartment.

“Do you have anything more?” Helen asked. “Did anyone see him on the street? Or any cameras? His car?”

“We’re working on different angles,” Calhoun said. “We also collected some DNA that didn’t match either you or Tyler. The knife may have nicked the intruder as he fled.”

“Blood?” Helen’s body went rigid. “His blood is in our apartment?”

“Just a tiny droplet, and we already collected it,” Calhoun said, measured and polite, but with an edge of scrutiny. “We’re running it through our database hoping to get a hit. That can take some time.”

“Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?”

“It’s an active investigation, and it’s all new, so we’re trying to consider every angle.”

Every angle. Helen knew that possibly meant her. It was possible that even with the eyewitness, Calhoun suspected Helen in a murder-for-hire plot. She should stay on guard and lawyer up.

But her innocence was not the foremost worry in her head. Worse things were killing her slowly.

Like how there’d been no sign of forced entry. That meant that either they had accidentally left their door unlocked or the intruder was very good at picking locks. The lock on their apartment door had been installed upside down. To engage the deadbolt, you had to turn it clockwise instead of counterclockwise. Tyler always double-checked the door before bedtime, to ensure neither of them had twisted the lock the wrong way, but she couldn’t remember seeing him do it that night. He’d fallen asleep on the couch, so maybe he’d forgotten. Helen should have checked the lock every single night herself too.

This ate at her.

At the cemetery, when she stood stone-faced next to Tyler’s family as strange men lowered the coffin into the ground, she knew Tyler’s body was inside the casket. She knew he was dead. But she also had the sense she was living inside a twisted fairy tale, something make-believe. She felt as if life had turned into a long tunnel she was walking through, trying not to touch the walls.

Afterward at the wake, Helen steeled herself when she saw Evelyn weaving through guests to get to her. Evelyn’s insistence on always keeping a stiff upper lip would be too much for a day like today. Helen reminded herself that she didn’t have to put up with the Wicked Stepmother anymore. Evelyn hadn’t said a word to Helen at the cemetery, had just given her a quick hug and a look that she’d been unable to read. She suspected Evelyn thought Tyler’s murder was somehow her fault. Maybe because of the presumably unlocked door. Maybe because she didn’t have a phone next to the bed. Maybe because it was Helen who had alerted the masked man that they were awake at the end of the hall. There were many ways to lay the blame, and seeing Evelyn’s pinched face approach, Helen braced for it.

When Evelyn reached her, the older woman grabbed Helen’s hand and pulled her into a side hallway, away from prying eyes. “Oh, Helen. I’ve never seen two people better suited for each other than you and Tyler.” Evelyn’s face crumpled. “You two gave me a strange kind of hope I’d never felt in my life before.”

“Oh, Evelyn.” Helen squeezed the woman’s hand.

“A few nights ago, I couldn’t sleep. Titanic was playing on TV, and there was the scene where Rose jumps from the lifeboat back onto the ship. I never understood that scene before. I always thought, Stupid girl. You’re safe. Why get back on the boat? Watching it a few days ago, I finally understood.” Evelyn put her arms around Helen and said the next part softly in Helen’s ear. “You would have jumped back on the ship for Tyler, and he for you. And I’m just so broken for you. I’m just so furious for you, and maybe this is selfish, but I’m so furious for me too, because it took away that hope I had about love being sweet and good and not just transactional. I’m just so mad at the whole world right now.”

Helen started to cry, right there in Evelyn’s arms.

Later, some of the guests at the wake would say that Evelyn had been crying too, but because the two women had been in the side hallway, no one other than Helen would ever know for sure. And even though Helen thought there was nothing shameful about crying, she had promised Evelyn—who was embarrassed by her display—that she wouldn’t tell a soul. And she never did.

About a week after the funeral, Helen saw Tyler crossing the street as she and her mother left the grocery store parking lot.

“Stop the car!” Helen cried out.

Her mother braked. “What?”

Helen was out the passenger door without an explanation and across the street, moving faster than she had since Tyler’s death. She followed him into the post office, her heart expanding. He was unlocking a PO Box, and she ran right up to him.

He turned to face her, confusion in his brown—not blue—eyes, and she took a step back.

It wasn’t Tyler.

Back in the car, her mother asked, “What happened?”

Helen said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

So they didn’t.

After that, she started seeing Tyler everywhere.

Tyler had died on the bedroom floor without Helen there. She hadn’t been holding him in her arms when he’d passed. He’d been alone and scared and in pain. Sometimes when she thought about that, she couldn’t stop herself from hitting something: a piece of furniture, the wall, her own leg.

The tallest bridge in Seattle was the Aurora Bridge. It was 167 feet above the water. Not a bad height.

Her boss, Darius, waited four days past the one-month mark to call and see if she was ready to come back to work.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

“Hanging in there,” Helen said, pulling a fleece blanket up to her chin.

It’s what people wanted to hear and it’s what she needed to say if she wanted to keep her job, but it was past noon and she was still in bed. She knew she couldn’t just float around her parents’ house for the rest of her life though. Perhaps work would be a distraction. Going into the office would require washing her hair more than once a week, but she could probably figure out a way to do that.

Darius asked, “When would you like to come back?”

“Could you give me one more week?”

“Of course.”

Helen hung up and got out of bed. It was time to go to the gun range. She had been riding her bicycle there almost every day in sweats and a baseball cap, two energy drinks in the basket on the front of the bike. One for the ride there, one for the ride back. They tasted like chemical shit, but they gave her a bit of a zing. She’d go to the corner market and buy any brand except Boom Now. When she saw those cans sitting behind the glass, she knew she was supposed to feel proud that her team had designed it, but she mostly just thought, Design #4 of 37.

There had been one time though when those cans had seized her with a crippling thought: She’d wondered if it hadn’t been for how stressful the Boom Now account had been, maybe she and Tyler would have bought a house. Then they wouldn’t have been in the apartment that night. Then he wouldn’t be dead. It was such a terrible concept that Helen had to write herself a text message from Tyler’s phone and send it to her own:

Of course it’s not your fault, Helen! We both decided to stay in the apartment. And remember, we were so happy again! Don’t think silly thoughts. I love you so much, Tyler

Some days, she read that message dozens of times.

Firing a gun and hitting the target was the only thing that gave Helen real, visceral satisfaction. It galvanized something in her, made her feel her anger more than her sadness.

The afternoon that Darius called, she returned from the gun range with the sour taste of apple-watermelon artificial flavor on her tongue, and she phoned Calhoun to inquire about progress in the case. Calhoun gave impossibly vague answers to Helen’s questions about suspects and evidence. Finally, Helen fell silent on her end.

Calhoun asked, “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

Anything else? She’d helped with nothing so far.

“Yes, there is,” Helen said. “I’d like to know if there’s a detective I could talk to who’s not a fucking idiot.”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line, and then Calhoun said in a kind voice, “I know you’re upset, Helen, and I know you want answers, but I don’t have any for you. Not yet. But I’m trying.”

“Sorry,” Helen said, feeling smaller and smaller. “I’m sorry.”

“I know. Okay, I’m going to let you go, okay?”

“Okay,” Helen echoed.

“Okay,” Calhoun repeated, still in that kind voice.

Helen hung up before Calhoun did.

When Helen had left Tyler lying on the floor of the bedroom, there was something he’d been trying to tell her. Helen, I need to tell you . . .

Now she would never know what it was.

She hadn’t even been able to give her husband the dignity of his final words.

“I’m going back to the apartment,” Helen said.

Helen’s mother lowered her fork and glanced at Helen’s father across the dinner table.

“You mean to sort through some things?” her mother asked.

No, that wasn’t what Helen meant. She lowered her own fork. She hadn’t really been eating much of the lasagna anyway. She was down six pounds now.

Her mother said, “If you wait until Saturday, I’ll go with you.”

“No,” Helen said. “I’m going to move back into the apartment.”

“Oh, honey. I already talked to the landlord. You don’t have to finish the lease.”

“I know. But I’m going back to work in a few days, so I need to be there.”

Her mother looked at Helen’s father again to silently request help, but her father was worse at this stuff than her mother was. He just stared at his plate.

“It will be fine,” Helen said.

“Helen,” her mother began delicately. “They haven’t even caught . . . him yet.”

Her mother thought it was possible the killer would come back to the apartment looking for Helen. It was a reasonable fear. Helen also thought it was possible.

Which was exactly why she wanted to go back.

Because she had bought herself a Glock 9mm.

Helen was ready.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Present day

The night after Wade tried to shoot his own brother, Helen dreamt of the farmhouse. In her dream, the house was alive with thoughts and feelings, but it was sick and it was dying. When the house exhaled, it wasn’t breath that flowed from its windows but smoke. Raccoons and vultures and coyotes circled the house, waiting for it to die so they could pick apart its remains. The coyote that Helen had seen in the woods eating the rabbit was there. She recognized it because of its bloody mouth. The raven she had shot was there too, sitting on top of the chimney, engulfed in the home’s smoke. Helen stumbled out the front door, desperate for fresh air, and saw Isaac standing among the wild animals waiting to scavenge the ruins with them. “Where’s Wade?” she asked him. “Do you care?” he answered.

Helen woke from the dream with strands of damp hair stuck to her forehead. She often had nightmares, but this one gave her the overwhelming sense that she had caused some kind of shift in the universe that couldn’t be undone.

She turned toward Wade and realized his side of the bed was empty. The room was dark, with only a glint of moonlight stealing through the window. She looked around the room. The door to the bedroom was slightly ajar.

“Wade?”

There was no answer.

On any other night, she would have gotten out of bed to check on him, but something kept her suspended there. Perhaps the final remnants of her nightmare.

She ran her fingers through her hair, pulled the loose strands away from her face, and felt a sentence unfold in her blood.

To be buried alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality.

The words passed through her as if she had perfected them for a recital, except she wasn’t even sure where they came from. She just knew they were not an original thought. And then in her mind, she saw a wooden coffin, imagined it entombing her, and she smelled the musky decay of dirt that never sees sunlight. She’d held this exact vision in her mind once before. Weeks earlier.

Suddenly, she knew.

Those words were from Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Premature Burial.” She’d only read the tale of a man being buried alive that one time, so there was no way she could have memorized the sentence verbatim.

And yet she had.

Her bedroom felt like the coffin now.

She needed to find Wade.

Helen tossed the blankets aside and dangled her stocking feet over the side of the bed, suspended in air momentarily.

On her inhale, she sensed the presence. She felt it in the way that it disturbed the air around her feet, in the way that she went cold all over her body before she even knew what was happening. As her toes touched the floor, she froze on the edge of the bed, and the only sounds were the night wind whining outside and the rattle of a loose board faintly thumping against the house.

From beneath the bed, something encircled her ankles.

Helen gasped and fell forward to her knees, yanking herself free from its hold. She scrambled to her feet and dashed for the door. When she reached it, she grabbed the frame and spun around.

No one was there.

The room was silent except for her ragged breathing.

She lowered to her knees and peered under the bed, but all she saw were dark and dusty floorboards.

She stood again. This time she hadn’t just seen something; she’d felt it too. The sensation around her ankles had felt real. It had yanked her to the floor. The pain in her knees told her it had happened.

Helen stepped into the empty hallway, careful not to touch the walls. They might be complicit in whatever this was.

“Wade?”

She didn’t find him in the bathroom, so she paused outside the guest bedroom. Very quietly, she cracked the door and peeked inside. Isaac slept peacefully. She gently closed the door and looked toward the living room.

She gasped.

In the shadows of the living room, a figure stood in the corner, indistinct details and edges, but Helen had the sense it was in a black robe with a sharp hood drawn around its face. It made her think of sacrifices and religious rites, like the ones W. B. Yeats had performed with his Ghost Club in the early 1900s. She heard a sound, like it was calling to her.

Going back to the bedroom wouldn’t make it go away, and she felt compelled to move toward it, the floor creaking beneath each step. The fear in her often battled with the curiosity she now had for the darkness, a strange duality that usually emerged at nighttime. Her hands curled into balls at her sides.

“What do you want?” she whispered as she entered the living room, and in that moment, she clearly saw the way the moonlight played against the window’s curtains and created the impression of folds and curves, but it was all just shadows. There was no dark figure. She was talking to shadows.

Then she saw her Edgar Allan Poe book lying face down in the middle of the room as if someone had deliberately displayed it. She picked it up and turned it over, expecting to find it open to “The Premature Burial,” but no, it was open to the poem “The Raven.”

“Helen?”

She jumped as Wade stepped into the room from the kitchen, momentarily blinding her with the lit lantern he held up. He was in his work pants and an undershirt. After he’d refused being second in line for a bath, he’d apparently found the ability to remove his own boots but not to put on his pajamas, because she had found him sprawled on top of the comforter that way when she’d finally gone to bed.

Wade lowered the lantern, and Helen saw that his eyes looked like black saucers.

“Why are you up?” he asked.

She held up the Poe book. “Did you put my book on the floor?”

“No, I was checking the house.”

“For what?”

“I’m just trying to protect us.”

“From Isaac? He’s asleep.”

“He’s pretending to be asleep.”

Wade spoke with such certainty, and she couldn’t meet that certainty with her own, so she fell silent. There was no denying that something was going awry here in the farmhouse, but Helen thought Wade had it wrong. In fact, as she looked up at his strained face, she began to wonder if he was the source of it all.

“Let’s go back to bed,” Wade said, as if she was going to be able to sleep now.

She returned the Poe book to the mantel and took down a book of Emily Dickinson poems. As they walked back to the bedroom, she clutched the book tightly in front of her.

Wade nodded at it and whispered, “What are you doing with that?”

“Nothing.”

In the bedroom, Helen didn’t read the Dickinson book. She simply held it to her chest as she lay in bed. Some people ward off the darkness with a Bible. Helen was going to attempt to do it with poetry.

Because I could not stop for Death—He kindly stopped for me

Two hours later, still wide awake in bed, Helen got up for a second time. She hesitated for a moment before lowering her feet to the floor, but no dark hands awaited her, and she felt a spark of anger at herself for hesitating in the first place. She set the Dickinson book on her bedside table and left the room.

Helen walked down the hall to the bathroom without listening for voices or looking for shadows posing as hooded figures. In college, she’d had a suitemate in the dorm who was Catholic, and that girl had insisted the devil gets in when you leave doors open for him. Well, Helen wasn’t going to leave doors open for devils or phantom figures or men with scars across their midsection.

She used the bathroom and was just starting back to her bedroom when a disconcerting feeling came over her again, the same one she’d had just before the hands had grabbed her from beneath the bed.

The same creeping feeling . . .

And then something dropped straight down in front of her from the ceiling. She let out a strangled noise and fell to the floor, covering her head with her arms.

Nothing crashed on top of her, but still, she was afraid to pull her arms away and look. She was certain something was still there with her in the hallway. She stiffened her mind, bracing for whatever it was she was about to see, and then she looked up.

A woman hung from the ceiling by a noose, head down as if her neck were broken, swinging slightly from a fresh death. Helen recognized the dirtied nightgown and the tangled dark brown hair. It was the same woman she’d seen in the flash of light at the dinner table.

And then the woman lifted her head and opened her eyes wide.

Helen stared into a face that looked exactly like her own. The hair, darker than Helen’s, wasn’t actually a darker shade of brown after all. Helen realized the hair was slicked with mud when she saw how dirty the face was—her face—on this hanging woman.

Shaking in fear, Helen squeezed her eyes shut.

When she opened them, the hanging version of her was gone.

She rolled onto her side and pulled her knees to her chest, hugging herself. She stayed coiled that way until the rising sun came through the living room windows and filtered into the hallway. It was only then that she sat up, cobwebs of the earlier fright still stuck in her brain.

Helen knew something was terribly wrong, but she told herself she was going to fix it. She wasn’t going to let herself get pulled down into this madness. She was going to stop it, and she had to start at the source.

Chapter Thirty

Less than two years ago

Helen was barely going through the motions at work. She heard one coworker say it to another in the women’s restroom. “Helen is barely going through the motions,” one of them said. Helen didn’t exit the stall until they were both gone.

They were right. The world was spinning fine without her. She sat in her office and forwarded emails from one member of her team to another, and soon the emails slowed, and Helen realized the employees were bypassing her. She wondered how long her boss, Darius, planned to let this go on. She knew she’d built up karma she’d never cashed in after the drama of managing the Boom Now account. For at least a little while longer, she could get away with this charade in which she pretended to work and everyone pretended to believe her.

When the clock in her office showed the end of the workday, her despair only intensified. She was back at the apartment sleeping on the living room couch. She hated the apartment. If she’d just bought a house with Tyler, they wouldn’t have been living there at all, and he’d be alive today.

It was all her fault.

Her landlord had replaced the bloodstained carpet in the bedroom, but Helen avoided that room as much as she could. She’d boxed up her now incomplete encyclopedia collection and shoved it into the back of the bedroom closet. In her childhood, those books had transported her to past times and faraway lands, but in her time of need they’d failed her. The police had volumes A, M, P, and S in evidence because Tyler’s blood was on them. It didn’t matter, because she never wanted to read them again. She kept some of her clothes folded on the living room armchair and hanging in the entryway’s coat closet. The loaded Glock was stored in the drawer of the entertainment center. When she went to sleep, she set the gun on the coffee table beside her.

The quiet that Tyler left behind was so loud because all of the spaces that used to be filled with him were now crushed with other people’s noise. Another person’s laughter in the hallway was the absence of his. A television show through the apartment wall was a show Helen couldn’t watch with him anymore. The sound of a blender in the apartment below was a protein shake he would never again drink. It began to feel as though the city were a competition to see who could make the most noise.

All evening she heard the clatter and the clamor, but she was really listening for one particular sound: the click of a lock being picked and the twist of her doorknob. Helen thought if she wished for it hard enough, her thoughts would lure the masked man back to the scene of the crime.

And then she’d shoot him in the stomach, same place he’d stabbed Tyler, and watch him bleed out.

In the very beginning, Helen liked the hallucinations of Tyler because it reinforced the possibility that maybe he was alive. Some people thought Elvis had faked his own death, so why couldn’t Tyler have done that? He was in the Secret Service, he was a Russian spy, he was in Witness Protection! He was just waiting for the right moment to let her in on the ruse.

Tyler, Tyler, Tyler.

But deep down, Helen knew he was gone, and the hallucinations started to feel like torture. She panicked once when the city bus drove past and she was sure Tyler was sitting inside at a window seat. She ran after the bus for two whole blocks, then broke down crying when it got on the freeway. A stranger put his hand on her shoulder—“Are you okay, Miss?”—but she wasn’t okay and she wasn’t a Miss. She was a Mrs. She was a man’s wife! Had been, at least. Helen had countless stories like this, but she wasn’t telling them to anyone. Even crazy people don’t like being called crazy.

Two months after Tyler’s death, she went to a psychiatrist who said she was experiencing “bereavement hallucinations.”

Helen said, “I know,” because she had Google. And then she asked, “How do we make them go away?”

“Time will help, as you process the grief and move through different stages of acceptance.”

As if Helen would ever accept that Tyler was gone. “What about pills?”

The psychiatrist hesitated before saying, “Antipsychotic medication can help people experiencing delusions or hallucinations, but typically, in the case of grief, we like to wait and see if they naturally resolve.”

Helen didn’t want to wait.

She booked an appointment with another doctor who told her the same thing.

But the third shrink gave her pills.

If it weren’t for Genessa’s cancer, Helen would not have gone to meet her at the bar for drinks. The murder of one’s husband makes it remarkably easy to reject all social invitations, but when a cousin calls and says “I miss you”—a cousin who just beat breast cancer—there is a sense of obligation.

Helen had a feeling her mother had put Genessa up to it though. Helen and Genessa’s relationship was side conversations on Christmas Eve and croquet competitions on the Fourth of July, but it was not pale ales at the local pub.

Genessa was late, stuck in traffic.

Helen sat down on a stool at the bar to wait, vaguely aware of the man in the Carhartt jacket seated next to her. She rested a hand on the bar and felt her palm stick to the wood. A bartender with a goatee glanced up and said, “What can I get you?”

“Whatever,” Helen said flatly.

The bartender raised an eyebrow, and Helen straightened up, deciding to try to make a partial effort. She gestured at the man next to her. “What’s he having?”

The bartender said, “A Rusty Nail.”

“Is that strong?”

“Pretty strong.”

The man nudged his glass a few inches toward her. “Try it.”

She waved her hand. “Oh, no. Thanks, but . . .” She nodded at the bartender. “Rusty Nail.”

“Any particular Scotch?”

“Oh, it’s Scotch?”

The man next to her smiled and nudged the glass another inch toward her.

“Oh, fine.” Helen took a sip and crinkled her nose. “Shit, never mind. Just give me a Rum and Coke.”

The bartender went to make the drink, and Helen slid the glass back toward the man. “Thanks.”

He told her his name was Wade, and she explained she was waiting for her cousin so he wouldn’t think they were starting up something. But by the time Genessa arrived twenty minutes later, it was starting to feel like they were starting up something.

It was so unexpected. Helen smiled several times, genuinely, during her conversation with Wade. And because she thought she was just passing a few minutes of meaningless time, she told him things she didn’t normally tell anyone. She told him that Tyler had been murdered three months ago and that she had to go to three doctors to get some pills because she thought the Uber Eats delivery guy had Tyler’s face.

Wade seemed unfazed by it all: the murder, the hallucinations, Helen’s blunt admissions. At the time, she took it as a sign of an open-minded man, someone who was understanding and complex. Only much later would she wonder if it was actually apathy.

When Genessa arrived, Wade asked for Helen’s number.

The conversation had been the first enjoyable thing that had happened to Helen since Tyler’s death, so she thought, Why not? and gave it to him.

Helen carried an armful of her clothes from the living room to the bedroom. Wade was picking her up at the apartment at six o’clock for their date, and her place looked like a dorm room. She was surprised to realize that she cared what he would think of her place. She did, but only a little.

Back in the living room, she picked up the strange little journal that sat on her coffee table and opened it to a random page. The journal was over half full with frantic, heartbroken ink scribbles across the pages. Most of it was unreadable. It was some version of shorthand that no one, not even Helen, knew. In all of the pain, she needed to journal, but her thoughts were always coming faster than her hands could ever move. Most of the words were represented by one or two letters only. When she looked at the pages now, she couldn’t read them. But she could still feel every ounce of them.

It wasn’t a journal so much as it was a downpour.

She tucked it in the entertainment center drawer, next to her Glock 9mm.

Wade took Helen to a restaurant where they ate fish and chips and talked. He didn’t ask her if she’d rather be a housecat or a lion, and they didn’t banter about the different colors of olives. But he pulled her chair out for her at the table, and he told her about running the family farm, and she noticed his lips were well moisturized, as if he’d just put balm on them. He explained that he’d been in Seattle for about a month, temporarily working for a construction company while he planned for his dream of living off the grid with the money he’d made from selling the farm.

There were lulls in their conversation where neither of them spoke for several minutes, and maybe in a different lifetime Helen would have found those silent interludes awkward, but there was something nice about it now. She would simply scan the restaurant or look out the window at the people on the sidewalk, and then her eyes would return to Wade’s. She saw the way he was gazing at her, like she was sweet and pretty. She wasn’t sure she was either of those things anymore, but she liked that he seemed to think so. Something about him made her feel deeply feminine and a little less tired. Toward the end of the evening, he said, “You’re easy to hang out with.”

When he kissed her good night at her front door, she confirmed that, yes, his lips were soft. It had been almost nine years since her first night with Tyler. Almost nine years of kissing her favorite lips in the world and only those favorite lips, and suddenly here were brand-new lips. Surprisingly, the kiss with Wade felt nice. The unfamiliarity of it was exciting.

She wondered what Tyler would think of her kissing another man so soon after his death, but she immediately knew the answer. He would never be mad at her for something like this. He’d want her to be happy. The bigger problem was that kissing Wade gave her a flicker of excitement in the moment, but later it opened up a deep fracture of sadness. It reminded her that Tyler’s lips were gone forever.

She didn’t plan to go on a second date with Wade. It was much too early for her to be dating anyone.

That night, she wrote more words in her strange little journal, unreadable scribbles of sorrow.

A few days after Helen’s date with Wade, Detective Calhoun called and asked Helen to come into the station.

In a soulless, windowless room, she told Helen the good news: The tiny drop of DNA blood evidence in the hallway had returned a match in the system, and they had made an arrest that morning.

The room started to tilt, and Detective Calhoun offered Helen water, which she drank faster than she should have, because then she was coughing.

Helen knew she was supposed to feel happy, but the arrest didn’t bring Tyler back, and as Detective Calhoun gave her more details—Jack Franklin, twenty-four, delivery driver, prior B and E, assault, and drug charges—she just felt her blood boiling.

Such an ordinary name for a monster. Helen would never be able to think of him as a Jack, and when Calhoun showed her the man’s mug shot, all Helen saw was the black ski mask. He would always be the masked man to her.

“Why did he do it?” Helen asked.

Calhoun looked up from her files. “Why?”

“Why did he kill my husband?”

Calhoun took a moment before answering. “Given his history, I think we can probably assume it was a robbery gone wrong.”

Helen didn’t want assumptions. She wanted a reason that Tyler was dead. She knew no one could give her a good reason, but at the very least she deserved a shitty reason.

“My husband and I used to get a vanilla latte on most Sundays. Just one to share,” Helen said. “He always took the first sip. Always. Do you know why?”

Calhoun regarded Helen warily. “Because he liked lattes so much?”

“No. To make sure it wasn’t too hot for me. So I wouldn’t burn my mouth. Who murders a man like that? I need to know why.”

Calhoun looked down at her papers and told Helen she would do her best to find out the masked man’s specific motive. “But Helen,” Calhoun said, “the answer might not satisfy you. Sometimes crimes are just senseless, random acts of violence.”

The next day, an arraignment was held. Calhoun called her afterward.

“Are they going to let him out on bail?” Helen asked.

“No. The judge didn’t grant bail,” Calhoun said, her tone reassuring.

“That’s good,” Helen said, trying to sound relieved, but she didn’t really think it was good, and relief certainly wasn’t what she was feeling.

In Helen’s imagination, there was a version of the past she rewrote in her head in which she was the heroine of the story. In that version, she put a bullet in the masked man’s chest on that fateful night. Boom. The villain, dead. Love of her life, alive.

It was too late for that perfect ending, but she was preparing for a different kind of ending. At the gun range that morning, she had hit the target almost every shot. So the truth was that she was gravely disappointed they were keeping the masked man behind bars. It would be impossible for her to shoot someone who was in police custody.

She should have waited outside the courthouse when they brought him in that morning for the arraignment.

Helen vowed to herself she wouldn’t miss her next opportunity.

Wade called her several times after their first date, undeterred by her flimsy excuses until she finally agreed on a second date.

Helen figured that, in person, she would tell Wade she wasn’t in a place to handle anything romantic. She never said those words though. Instead, she discovered as the evening went on that hearing Wade’s voice respond to hers held so much allure. She almost didn’t care what he said, so long as he said something. And when he started talking again about moving to the middle of nowhere, not so subtly suggesting that she’d love the forest too, she thought it sounded a little magical.

Besides, if she was going to kill a man, she’d need a place to hide.

Helen hadn’t seen visions of Tyler around the city in a few weeks. She wasn’t sure if the pills were starting to work or if her mind was starting to work.

When Calhoun called and asked her to come into the station, she had an uneasy feeling though. It was something in the woman’s tone.

The news was worse than she expected.

The masked man was going to accept a plea deal. Guilty of second-degree murder. He’d be eligible for parole in twenty-five years.

“What?” Helen said. “But he could be out before he’s fifty!”

“I understand that number sounds shocking,” Calhoun said, “but let me put a few things in perspective. With robberies and burglaries, the DA almost always pursues second degree—”

“But it was obviously premeditated! First degree! We were just standing there. Did he say why our apartment? Did he say why he stabbed Tyler?”

“He did explain himself, yes.”

Helen sat up straighter. The Big Why of it. Finally. “What did he say?”

“He was on drugs that night.”

“So? Lots of people do drugs and don’t kill people. That’s the reason he gave? Drugs? That’s not a reason at all!”

Calhoun lifted her hand, a gentle but firm request that Helen be quiet. Helen’s shoulders slumped as she fell silent.

“He said he would go to your apartment building sometimes to buy drugs,” Calhoun said. “His dealer lived on your floor.”

“Great,” Helen muttered. “Never realized we lived in a druggie building.”

“Drugs are sold all over the city.”

Once again, Helen thought, If only we’d bought a house instead.

“But he didn’t have enough money that night,” Calhoun said. “Dealer wouldn’t sell to him, so he left angry. He went down to his car and got the ski mask and a hunting knife, intending to go back up and rob the dealer. But once he was on your floor, he had second thoughts—the dealer has a gun—so instead he decided to steal money to buy the drugs. He’s picked locks before, and he just chose your door at random.”

Helen lowered her head as a wave of emotion hit her. “He picked the lock?”

“Yeah, he said he picked the lock.”

“So I didn’t leave the door unlocked.”

Calhoun put a hand on Helen’s shoulder. “He went into your apartment looking for cash. He was high on bath salts. They’re a powerful psychoactive drug. They can make people violent and paranoid.”

Helen shook her head. No excuse.

“He said he doesn’t remember the night clearly, but he panicked when he thought you might be calling the police.”

Helen inhaled sharply and looked at Calhoun with imploring eyes. “So it’s because I ran back to the bedroom? That’s why he did it?”

“Helen, stop,” Calhoun said. “You won’t find a reason like that. I’ve been in this job too long, and the more I see, the less I know. But one thing I know for sure: This isn’t your fault. This is senseless violence. This is a crazy, damaged person doing a horrible thing to innocent people. You can search for all the reasons in the world to try to make sense of it, but I’ll tell you, no matter what you think you’ve figured out, your reason sure as hell better not be anything you did. Don’t do that to yourself. Do you understand?”

Helen squeezed the bridge of her nose. “Yeah, I understand. Does he remember stabbing my husband?”

Calhoun paused before answering. “He says he doesn’t.”

“He’s lying.”

“Probably.”

“Twenty-five years is not enough. He killed Tyler. He killed him.” Helen dropped her head into her hands. “Tyler is gone. He’s not gone for twenty-five years. He’s gone forever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever . . .” She had no idea how many times she said the word ever, but Calhoun let her say it ten times, twenty times, a million times.

When Helen finally stopped and looked up, Calhoun’s eyes were a little shiny. But that didn’t do anything to make Helen feel better, because the monster was getting a deal. Tyler was dead, and the person responsible would be out of prison before he even qualified for Denny’s fifty-five and over menu.

Helen first slept with Wade the same night that Calhoun told her about the plea deal. What she really wanted to do was kill a specific man. So instead she fucked a different one.

She had already decided she would wait outside the courthouse on the day of the masked man’s sentencing—she refused to think of him by his name—and she would shoot him. If she was able to escape from the scene, getting out of town with Wade would be a good option. And if they caught her outside the courthouse, she’d be going away to prison for a long time. So she may as well have sex while she could. Wade had started to awaken something inside of her, and she was curious. She’d started to imagine him on top of her and inside of her. She was a widow, but she was still a woman too. In true crime shows, everyone always thought the spouse was guilty of the crime if they dated someone too soon after the murder. But all those vipers judging from their comfortable couches had no idea what it felt like to be truly torn to pieces. You would take almost any scrap that gave you comfort.

So she went home and cried in the shower as she shaved her legs, cutting herself three times. The first two times were accidents; the third time she wasn’t sure.

And then she called Wade. “Can I come over tonight?”

The line was silent for a moment. She suspected it wasn’t the question that had given him pause but the way she’d asked it. It was impossible to miss the urgency in her tone.

“Yeah, of course,” he finally said.

So she went to his apartment, and when he answered the door, she put her hands on him. They didn’t talk. They just kissed and grappled with each other as they walked backward into the room, falling onto the couch.

She didn’t come that night, but later, when she was home alone, she touched herself as she thought about how she’d made him come. Even if she was dead inside, she could still make others feel alive, and that had to count for something.

Three blocks from the courthouse, there was a small alley with no security cameras, a bunch of crates stacked up, and two large dumpsters. Helen turned in a slow circle, taking in the dark passage. One side was the back of a laundromat, the other the back of a restaurant. The few windows were small and high, with bars on them. So as long as nobody took a smoke break, she’d be fine.

The masked man’s arraignment was in three days. Helen could park her car farther away in the neighborhood and walk to this spot. Here, she could stash her coat and swap it out for a second one she’d carry in a plastic grocery bag. Change her shoes too. That way, if security cameras on the street caught her going to or from her car, “the shooter” would appear to be a different woman from the one who walked from the neighborhood. Should she change her gait between her two personas? Maybe she should limp slightly from her car to and from the alley. She’d obviously be running as fast as she could from the courthouse after the shooting.

Helen was going to wear sunglasses and a gray flannel neck gaiter pulled over her nose and mouth. She’d keep her hood over her head. She hoped it would be drizzling on the day, because from her car she planned to carry an umbrella to further obscure her from security cameras. She’d stash the umbrella here with her coat before she proceeded to the courthouse. Her goal was to grab the items on her escape back to her car. If she couldn’t do that, she’d be at risk of the police finding them before she could come back to retrieve them. But she figured if she’d made it three blocks without capture, she’d probably already outrun them in the first place. She used to be fast, but since Tyler’s death she hadn’t been working out. The night before, she had put on her running shoes and gone for a test run. She’d sprinted down the sidewalk, and too quickly she’d felt the burning in her lungs and the lactic acid pooling in her thighs. Most cops were out of shape these days though, and she’d have adrenaline on her side.

It seemed like a good plan. Not foolproof. But better than some of that shit she’d seen the idiots do on Dateline and 48 Hours Mystery.

The only problem was, if they caught her, there would be no way she could plead second degree. This was, without a doubt, going to be a first-degree murder.

Chapter Thirty-One

Present day

After Helen’s morning bath, she rummaged through a small plastic bin under the sink that contained toiletries and medications. It didn’t take her long to find the prescription bottle she wanted.

A little later, when she stepped outside in a fresh dress, clean hair swirling past her shoulders, the pill bottle was tucked in her dress pocket. It was a crisp but warm morning, and the sun felt good.

Isaac was near the garden using a shovel to dig a hole.

As she approached him, she saw the dead raven lying on the ground near the small grave she’d dug. The bird was partially decomposed now, and the grave had been disturbed. She’d given the bird a premature burial of sorts.

“I guess I dug that too shallow,” she said. “Did an animal get into it?”

“Looks like it,” he said.

Helen peered into the new grave Isaac was digging. It was much larger, much deeper. Maybe three feet long, two feet wide, three feet deep.

“That seems excessively large for a bird,” she said.

Isaac looked down into the grave and laughed lightly, and Helen couldn’t help but smile.

“Yeah, it is,” he said. “I needed to work off some steam, so I kept digging. I’ll fill it back in when I’m done.”

“Is something wrong?”

“Just a little worried about Wade.”

“Where is he?”

Isaac gestured toward the forest. “He went out that way. I tried to talk to him this morning. He won’t even acknowledge me.”

“Sometimes he does that.”

“Maybe I should just leave.”

“No,” Helen said, too quickly, too firmly. Her fast response felt transparent, so she amended her tone with a lighter one. “I mean, it’d be nice if you could stay a little while longer. I’ll try to talk to him.”

Isaac nodded faintly, and then his gaze moved from her face to her hair and back to her eyes, so swiftly it was barely discernible.

Helen found Wade sitting on a log near a small pond in a clearing of trees. Not far from this spot, she had found the beaver dam, the one she’d wanted to show Agnes.

“Hey,” Helen said as she sat down beside Wade.

“Hey.”

From her dress pocket, she pulled out the prescription pill bottle.

After a moment, he blinked in recognition. “Is that your antipsychotic?”

She was impressed Wade remembered what type of drugs she’d been taking when he’d met her. “Yeah.”

“I didn’t know you brought that here.”

“I had some left in my last bottle.” She shrugged. It’s what you do. Keep old meds.

“Good idea,” he said.

Helen inhaled, hopeful. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Wade looked out at the pond. “If it helps.”

This was going much better than she had anticipated.

“It could,” she said.

“Good. I need you to understand what I’m trying to tell you. Will it work right away?”

It took Helen a moment to comprehend Wade’s assumption. When it finally hit her, she said, “No, Wade. I thought you might want to try the medication.”

“Me?”

“You think your brother is a ghost.”

Wade stood, disgusted. “I can’t even talk to you about this.”

“That’s nothing new. You’ve never been able to talk to me about anything.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“My husband was murdered in front of me.”

Wade looked at her like she was crazy. “I know that!”

“I used to think I was seeing him in the streets after he was gone.”

“Why are you telling me things I know?”

“Because that’s about all you know. The basic facts. But you never ask me how I’m doing. Does it not concern you that I haven’t been able to sleep the entire time you’ve known me?”

“That’s why I told you about lavender tea. What are we even talking about? This is not important. A goddamn ghost has slept in our guest room for the last two nights. That’s what’s important!”

Helen looked at Wade with true vitriol.

He left, and she stayed there awhile longer. Alone in the forest of sighs.

Tyler, Tyler, Tyler.

When she returned to the farmhouse at last, Isaac was nowhere to be seen. She crossed the yard toward the grave he’d dug. The raven was no longer on the grass.

At the edge of the grave, she looked down inside it, expecting to see the bird, but the grave was empty.

The hole was even larger now. While Helen was in the woods, Isaac had continued digging. Now the grave was big enough to hold a person.

Slam! The meat mallet crashed onto a pill on the cutting board.

Helen smashed the last of the antipsychotic pills into a powder, then swept it all into a small glass jar. She was hiding the jar in the back of her spice cabinet when Isaac came into the room.

“Isaac,” she said. “We need to talk alone, if that’s okay.”

“Sure,” he said.

But right then Helen saw Wade through the window, walking toward the house.

“Later tonight,” she quickly added.

Isaac nodded and picked up a rag to clean his boots.

Wade entered the house without wiping his boots down. He went straight to the sink and filled up a glass of water.

“Wade, I thought you might want my help in the trees tomorrow,” Isaac said.

Wade turned back slowly to face Isaac but said nothing. Then he drank the glass of water, never taking his eyes from his brother.

“That sounds nice,” Helen finally chimed in.

Wade glared at her, then addressed Isaac in a flat voice. “What kind of game are you playing?”

Isaac tossed the rag aside. “No game. I’m more than happy to help you.”

Helen looked at Isaac sharply. Was there something hostile lurking in his tone? No, Isaac was gazing at Wade pleasantly enough. She’d just imagined it.

“Maybe you two could work on some of the trees within walking distance, and then I could go into town tomorrow for supplies,” Helen said. She envisioned herself driving the truck with the windows down and the heat cranked against the autumn wind. “With the three of us here, we’re getting short on some things.”

“I need the truck tomorrow.” Wade set the glass in the sink, then walked toward the front door. “Helen, a word?”

She rolled her eyes. God, she was getting tired of the way he barked orders at her. It was one thing when they were alone, but when he did it in front of Isaac, it really showed just how rude he could be.

Nevertheless, she followed him onto the front porch.

Wade huddled close to her and spoke in a murmur. “I’ve been thinking long and hard,” he said gravely. “Isaac was always mad about something when he was alive. He had a short fuse, and now his soul won’t rest. I think he blames me for his death.”

Helen sighed. She didn’t know if the antipsychotic pills would have any immediate effect after she drugged Wade tonight, but she assumed it would take some time. Until then, she was going to have to get used to having versions of this conversation.

Wade continued, “There’s no way I can force him to leave. The only chance I have is to get through to him. Convince him to leave on his own.”

Finally, something halfway reasonable. At least his new plan didn’t involve shooting his brother. They were headed in the right direction.

“Okay, that makes sense,” Helen said, and she tried to smile encouragingly. “Even if you guys had problems in the past, I’m sure it wasn’t all bad. When you talk to him, try to find common ground. Maybe bring up some of the good times you used to have.”

Wade didn’t return the smile. “We never had good times.”

That evening at dinner, Wade lifted a spoonful of drugged mashed potatoes to his lips. Helen and Isaac were eating mashed potatoes too, but theirs contained no antipsychotic powder.

She watched Wade shovel the last bite of potatoes into his mouth and wash it down with a swallow of cold water. He thought he still ruled the kingdom. He didn’t know she had already poured the iron mask.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Nineteen months ago

Crouched behind the dumpster, Helen’s heart was beating wildly as she switched from her green winter coat to a charcoal-gray hooded jacket. One hundred and sixty beats per minute at least. Maybe one seventy. She used to wear a heart monitor watch when she went jogging with Tyler. She never got above one fifty, even on the hills.

Anticipating murder was more taxing to the heart than the steepest inclines of Queen Anne Hill.

The afternoon was perfect. Drizzly and overcast. A hood over the head didn’t stand out among the crowd. A neck gaiter covering her mouth and nose—not so weird on such a chilly day. Sunglasses—a bit odd, but not that remarkable.

Helen left the alley from the opposite side that she’d entered, right hand resting in her coat pocket against the Glock 9mm.

Helen got to the courthouse early and waited outside for exactly twenty-seven minutes and forty-four seconds before the masked man arrived in the back of a cop car.

Her hand itched against the handle of the gun, still in her coat pocket.

She was a very good shot from all her practice at the shooting range, but she needed to get closer because there would be two cops walking next to him, and she didn’t want to risk hitting the wrong person. She crossed the grass in front of the courthouse.

The cop who emerged from the driver’s side of the car was a portly, middle-aged man. Someone she could easily outrun. She pushed aside the other thought: You can’t outrun a bullet.

The portly cop opened the back door of the car, and the masked man unloaded himself onto the curb.

Helen didn’t look at his bare face. She didn’t want to see eyes and nose and lips and chin and ears. She looked at his stomach, because that’s where he’d stabbed Tyler. Then her gaze moved up to his chest. He’d shattered her heart so maybe it would be most fitting to shatter his.

In her pocket, she turned the gun’s safety off.

The cop said something to his partner, who was walking around the front of the car. The space between the cops and the masked man was sufficient.

Helen stepped forward. She was now only fifteen feet from the masked man.

She pulled the gun from her pocket and pointed it at his heart. She’d practiced this movement inside her apartment.

Finger on the trigger.

The masked man said, “Oh, shit,” and she looked up into his eyes. The same eyes she’d seen through the holes of his ski mask on that terrible night. But now they weren’t fever crazed. Now they looked almost human.

Helen froze. Her finger didn’t press against the trigger.

The portly cop turned then, saw her pointing the gun. He brought his hand to his waist. He was going to pull his own gun. She’d missed her chance.

Helen whipped around and sprinted away, down the length of the sidewalk. Her own footsteps were pounding, her breath loud, so she couldn’t hear if they were chasing her, but she couldn’t imagine they weren’t.

She ran and ran. Into traffic, through alleys, crisscrossing the blocks of downtown Seattle until she was finally brave enough to look behind her.

No one was there. She had no idea if she’d outrun them or if they’d never taken pursuit in the first place.

Her knee, the one that she used to get tendonitis in, was throbbing.

The masked man was still alive. She’d failed.

Helen parked her car at a restaurant on the south side of the Aurora Bridge. She stumbled toward the bridge, pummeled by the roar of traffic on Highway 99 as the cars whipped past. The pedestrian sidewalk on the bridge was only a few feet wide, with waist-high railings on both sides. On the water side, there was a second, taller railing, with tiny little vertical bars that shook violently in the wind.

People rarely walked the pedestrian sidewalk because the bridge itself was a terrifying piece of historical Seattle architecture. Cars were forced to cross in lanes so narrow that buses turned on their hazards and took up two lanes. There was no median divider between north and south traffic, and there were no shoulders either. So no one was on the sidewalk that afternoon to say to Helen, “Ma’am, please don’t!” Or “Ma’am, are you okay?”

She reached the part of the bridge that was directly over Lake Union and she stopped, staring down at the cool blue water 167 feet below.

After a moment, she grasped the lower railing and climbed onto it. With her feet on the lower railing, she could now reach the top of the taller railing. The bars were sticking through the top, but if she didn’t care about scraping herself, she could hoist herself over it.

There were plenty of cars tearing past, but most drivers were concentrating on staying in their lane, so only a few even noticed the woman on the bridge. A college student looked up from texting and thought she saw someone standing on the railing, but then she almost sideswiped the car next to her and refocused on staying between the white lines. A wife turned to her husband and said, “Oh my God, I think a woman is about to jump. Should we call 911?” An eight-year-old boy saw her too, but he said nothing to his parents because he didn’t yet understand about tragedy.

In the end, a handful of people saw Helen standing on the railing, but not a single person saw her throw the Glock 9mm into the bottom of the lake.

Calhoun called Helen’s cell phone as she was driving to Wade’s house that evening.

“Were you at the courthouse this afternoon?” Calhoun asked in an urgent tone.

“No,” Helen said, surprised by how level her own voice was. “I didn’t want to see his face. Is the sentencing over?”

There was a long pause, then Calhoun said, “Helen, someone pointed a gun at Franklin outside the courthouse today.”

Helen pulled her car to the curb and parked it. She needed to concentrate so she didn’t say the wrong thing. “What do you mean?”

“A person with sunglasses and a scarf or something obscuring their face pointed a gun at Jack Franklin.”

“Did they shoot him?”

“No.”

“That’s too bad.”

There was another pause, then Calhoun said, “Helen, he’s been sentenced. Twenty-five years to life.”

“When is he eligible for parole?” Helen already knew the answer, but she wanted to make Calhoun say it.

“Twenty-five.”

“Congratulations,” Helen said in a tight voice.

“I’m sorry, Helen.” Calhoun sighed. “I know it’s not the outcome you wanted. But I’m glad you didn’t do anything stupid today. Anything too stupid, that is.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Helen said.

All she could think about was how she was going to have to wait another twenty-five years to get a chance to kill the masked man.

In the end, Helen just needed to get out of Seattle. The city had failed both her and Tyler, and she wanted to be in a place where his memory wasn’t the imprint on every sidewalk table, the sound in every shop’s door chime, and the light cast from every streetlamp. Seattle had once belonged to them, and now it was empty concrete without him. It was a sad place full of so many uncertainties and unknown dangers.

Deep down, she knew running away wasn’t the answer. But there was a faint fluttering in her chest when she looked into Wade’s hazel eyes and a little voice in her head that said, But maybe it could be.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Present day

There’s something about the hush of meeting secretly in the night. The air becomes charged with a tempest of temptation the moment the words are whispered: We need to talk alone.

Helen had spoken those words to Isaac in the kitchen earlier in the day, and now she felt that forbidden energy as she glided down the hallway, and she felt it as the floorboards creaked beneath her feet when she entered the living room. This time, the floors weren’t creaking as an expression of her weariness, they were an announcement that a much-anticipated moment had arrived.

Isaac turned expectantly at the sound. It was only his third night with them, yet it felt like he’d been there much longer. It already felt normal that he was standing in front of the fireplace looking at her books, just waiting for her to emerge from her bedroom. It hadn’t taken long for Wade to fall asleep, perhaps nudged along by the meds. Until his body adjusted to them, it would be normal for him to feel drowsy at first.

Helen was still in her dress and shoes, and Isaac was in his pants and a black T-shirt, presumably the undershirt he had been wearing beneath his canvas button-up, but it was the first time she had seen him not in his long sleeves. Isaac also had his boots on, since Wade was no longer removing his inside the farmhouse. (I need to be in my boots in case he turns on us, Helen!) At her insistence, Wade had at least begrudgingly placed them next to the bed before he got into it.

Isaac had been carefully wiping his boots down with the rags by the front door, but Helen had given up on the floor for now. It seemed like an inconsequential thing to worry about in light of everything else.

Helen and Isaac came together in the center of the room.

He spoke in a low voice. “What did you want to tell me?” His hand touched her wrist lightly as their heads bent toward each other. It felt so easy, this solidarity.

“It might be hard for you to hear.”

“I’m sure I’ve heard worse.”

When Helen didn’t speak right away, she felt the pressure on her wrist increase ever so slightly. Reassuring, encouraging.

“Wade is having some type of guilt-driven delusions,” she finally said.

“What are those?”

She hesitated, but not because she was unsure if she should tell Isaac what was happening. She was convinced he needed to know, and she wanted him to confirm she was handling it correctly. She hesitated because she knew the admission was so shocking it would cause a shift between them. His hand was there against the delicate bones of her wrist, and she didn’t want it to go away. But at last, she said, “He believes you were killed in that tractor accident.”

Isaac reacted, in rising degrees, as he tried to process it. He let go of her wrist, then stepped back and brought a hand to his head.

“He thinks you’re back from the dead,” Helen said. “That’s why he’s been so strange.”

“So he’s very sick then?”

“It’s obviously not an official diagnosis, but I’d say it’s a pretty significant delusion, wouldn’t you?”

“Yeah, yeah, I would.” Isaac shook his head, trying to wrap his mind around it.

“I have some medicine I think will help. He refuses to take it, so I’m slipping it into his food. I mean, I started tonight at dinner.”

She braced herself for a reproach. She’d just admitted to drugging her husband, and saying the words out loud made her wonder if it was the wrong course of action. But Isaac just said, “Okay. Good. That’s good.”

“Maybe that’s the wrong thing to do though.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Isaac said. “He should see a doctor, I guess, but Wade’s stubborn, so good luck getting him there.”

“True.”

“You probably need to drug him in order to convince him to see a doctor.” He spoke slowly, half of his mind seemingly in the conversation with Helen, the other half far away. He walked to the couch and sat down. “I think I just need a minute.”

“Of course,” Helen said, and she went outside to give him space.

Her shoulders felt lighter as she gazed up at the moon. The night sky was made of velvet now, and only a few crickets were chirping, a reminder of the summer that had passed her by. Those crickets had to be the last survivors of the season, the ones that wouldn’t give up the mating call even though, soon, the October frost would kill them off.

She closed her eyes and breathed in deeply. She’d been trying to reach out to Tyler for so long to no avail, and in her grief, she’d almost given up. But maybe Tyler was reaching back to her in his own way now. Maybe he’d sent Isaac to visit them, to break up her intense loneliness of these last months. People often spoke of guardian angels having influence over events in their lives. It wasn’t such a crazy idea. Maybe Tyler couldn’t come back to her in any perceivable form, but he could help her from afar in small ways.

When Helen opened her eyes again, a movement near the garden grabbed her attention. She squinted against the darkness.

Good God. Someone was trying to crawl out of the grave Isaac had dug. This time it wasn’t a phantom. From here, she couldn’t see the details of his face, but she could see his hands—fleshy and clearly human—reaching out of the hole, burrowing into the grass above for leverage. This time she was sure it was a real man, and he was about to hoist himself out of the grave.

Helen stumbled backward against a rusty wheelbarrow. The hollow thud of the impact echoed as she fell to the ground, and the pain jolted through her leg. She climbed to her feet, pieces of grass clinging to her hands, and looked out at the grave.

The man was gone.

When Helen walked into the living room, she tried her best to appear calm, but Isaac recognized her distress and stood.

“What is it?”

“Nothing. It’s nothing.”

“Your face isn’t saying nothing.”

Helen wasn’t sure if she was grateful or embarrassed that Isaac could read her so easily. A little bit of both. “I thought I saw something, but I didn’t. Outside.”

“Show me.”

She nodded. Breathless, she led him through the kitchen and out the front door, stopping on the porch, not wanting to venture into the yard. Isaac wasn’t touching her, but she felt him hovering so close over her shoulder that it was almost like he was.

“In the grave,” Helen whispered.

“The grave?”

“I thought I saw someone climbing out of it.”

Isaac stepped beside her and looked at her for a long beat. At first, she thought he was going to tell her it sounded like a silly ghost story, but after a moment he said, “Let’s take a look.”

They crept down the two front porch steps. As soon as she felt the grass and dirt beneath her feet, she wanted to run back onto the safety of the porch and lock herself inside the farmhouse. But she had Isaac by her side, so she slowly approached the grave. As they got close to it, they exchanged a look. His expression told her it would be okay. She didn’t know what hers conveyed. Hopefully not insanity.

They reached the grave and peered down. Empty.

Helen exhaled heavily. She needed him to know what was happening to her. She suddenly wanted to tell him about seeing the masked man in the closet and the hanging version of herself in the hallway, and she wanted to tell him about the hands that grabbed her from beneath her bed. She couldn’t bear to give the weird specifics of it though, so she simply said, “The truth is, I keep thinking I’m seeing things. Maybe I’m going crazy too.”

“No,” Isaac said. “Wade has you rattled with the crazy things he’s saying about me.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Where’s the raven?”

He gestured vaguely behind her. “I buried it in a smaller grave out there.”

She stared down into the large grave. “Why’d you dig such a big hole? Someone could fall in here.”

“I’ll fill it in tomorrow.”

“Maybe I should lie down in it just before you do that.”

Isaac stilled, an uneasy curiosity passing across his face. Was that her attempt at a joke?

Helen saw the question in his eyes and knew he was hoping she’d laugh to show it was just a bad attempt at humor, but she couldn’t even muster a smile. “Sorry” was all she said.

The chirping of the crickets was the only noise for several long moments.

Finally, Isaac said, “Do you sew all these dresses you wear?”

The change of subject surprised her. “Oh. Yeah.”

“That’s quite a talent.”

“Not really. This one, I had to undo the stitching four times to get it right.”

“You must like sewing to stick with it.”

“I hate sewing,” Helen said. “I hate everything.”

“No, don’t say that.” Isaac reached out a hand and softly brushed her hair back over her shoulders. “You can’t hate everything.”

“I had a husband before Wade.”

“You did?” Isaac’s eyebrows rose, his face all wrong, as if he thought she was about to divulge an interesting scandal, not the heartbreak of the century. “What was the first guy like?”

“Do you really want to know?” Her voice came out like a challenge.

Isaac heard it, and his own voice turned serious. “If you want to tell me, I’m all ears.”

Helen looked down into the grave. “The first guy was the most patient, understanding, kind person ever. Much too good for me.”

“Somehow I doubt that.”

She shook her head. “That’s because you never got to meet him.”

“Did he leave you?”

“In a way.”

“Then he’s an asshole.”

“No, he’s not.” She gave Isaac the sorrowful smile of funerals and deathbeds and candlelight vigils. “He didn’t want to leave me. He was murdered.”

“Oh, Helen. I’m sorry.”

“Murdered just because.” Helen gestured around her at the night air. “Because crickets cannibalize their own as it gets cold. And men lose their minds and stab other men they don’t even know.”

Isaac said his next words so quietly, she could barely hear them. “That’s terrible.”

“I thought if I married Wade and came out here, I’d be able to get away from it. But you can’t ever get away from something like that.”

Isaac bowed his head in sad recognition. She was glad he didn’t try to say anything comforting. Expressions of condolences are unworthy of some types of loss.

“Until you showed up, I was just waiting,” she said.

He lifted his head. “For what?”

“To die.”

Isaac drew in a slow breath, the empathy on his face. “And what are you doing now?”

“Still waiting,” she said. “To see what you’ll do next.”

“What I’ll do?”

“Every minute of the day, I’m either inside my head reliving the past or I’m just hovering outside the present moment, watching things unfold. I’ve found that from a distance, I can handle it better. So now I’m just watching this all and waiting to see what happens.”

Helen turned to leave.

She got halfway across the yard before Isaac caught up to her and clasped her arm. She spun around slowly to face him, and they gazed at each other for several beats.

She said, “And you seem to be waiting to see what I’ll do next.”

The moment was hanging by a thread. It felt like the slightest wind could shred that delicate thread, but they stayed there, locked in the moment, until at last she stepped closer to him. Now there was only a foot between them. They stared at one another, breathing in, breathing out. She moved one step closer, putting their faces only inches from each other. A long breath held, like a dare. She felt a shiver travel down her spine, that heady mixture of desire and fear, the stillness before leaping off a cliff into the water below. Isaac’s eyes were asking her for it, but Helen knew he wasn’t going to initiate it. He was going to make her come and get it.

So she planted her mouth onto his so hard she couldn’t even feel his lips at first, just the exhilaration of the collision. His arms went around her, and as the kiss deepened, her body relaxed and her mouth softened, and the kiss turned into something sweeter, and she began to lose herself in it. The easy harmony of it moved into her chest, yet there was something else in there too. Adventure. Yes, that was it: adventure.

When was the last time she’d felt that?

Helen pulled away and pushed Isaac hard. He took an abrupt step back to keep his balance and looked at her, surprised by her sudden forceful burst.

It had felt good, pushing him. Even better than kissing him did.

Isaac didn’t make any move to question Helen or stop her, so she pushed him again and he let her, braced himself just enough to take it, but not so much that she couldn’t feel the weight of him move under her anger.

As the passion and anger drained out of her, the sadness began to take hold again, the hoax of it all.

In the weeks and months and years since Tyler’s death, Helen had felt her strength and resolve and goodness leave her. There had been the initial impact of his murder, like a bomb detonating inside her, but over time, there had been continued effects. It was like she lived in the aftermath of a war zone, remnants of wreckage everywhere.

A man named Wade and miles of forest hadn’t been able to give her the refuge she was searching for. Maybe she just needed to light the entire place on fire. Burn it all down.

She gave Isaac one last look and left him there, alone in the yard with the dying crickets.

Chapter Thirty-Four

The teakettle on the kitchen stove shrieked. Helen heard it all the way back in the bedroom, where she was dressing alone. Isaac must have made the morning tea. She couldn’t imagine Wade doing it.

Minutes later, she entered the kitchen, her expression guarded. Both Wade and Isaac were in work clothes, their coats on. Isaac’s head was tilted back as he finished the last drops of liquid in his mug.

“Good,” Helen said, her voice cold. “It seems you’ll both be gone today.”

Isaac tried to catch her eye, but Helen refused to look at him.

“Did you get your lunch bags out of the fridge?” She directed the question at her husband, but Isaac was the one who answered.

“Yeah. And I packed some walnuts I found in the cellar. Maybe I’ll grab us some of the canned peaches I saw down there too.”

She still couldn’t bring herself to meet Isaac’s eyes, not after last night, so she kept her gaze on the table until he disappeared through the cellar door.

“Wade, stick to your plan,” she whispered. “Don’t do anything stupid out there.”

“Meaning?”

“Don’t try to hurt your brother this time.”

“I won’t. It wouldn’t work anyway.” Wade scowled at her. “You can’t hurt someone who’s dead.”

Isaac returned from the cellar just then with a can of peaches, and she looked at him directly for the first time that morning. Those dark eyes, that curious brow, those full lips. The corner of his mouth lifted slightly as he blinked at her, slow and deliberate.

Isaac, Isaac, Isaac.

She looked away. “I think I’ll sew today.”

Helen didn’t sew that day, but she briefly considered sticking the sewing needles into the soft flesh of her thighs, just to see what it would feel like. She decided against it though, for no reason other than she just lost interest in the idea before she had a chance to get her sewing supplies from the closet.

Instead, she walked out to the pond and stood at the water’s edge for a long time, wondering how many stones Virginia Woolf had needed in her pockets to weigh herself down so she could drown.

Then she walked back to the farmhouse and stared at it until the windows started to look like eyes and the door a nose. When she realized there was no mouth anywhere on the house, she thought, Of course not. It’s silent in the grave, like me.

Helen then went to the garden to examine her Brussels sprouts. She still needed to pick off the cabbage worms.

If she cut all the plants off at the soil right now and burned them in the fireplace, would Wade even notice he’d missed Brussels sprouts this fall? It wasn’t a terrible idea.

She went around to the side of the house to collect the ax to do just that, but she ended up sitting down on the stump, and that’s where she was when Agnes emerged from the woods. Agnes waved as she crossed the meadow, but Helen didn’t have the energy to lift her hand from the handle of the ax.

When Agnes reached her, she said, “What’s wrong?”

“Just tired.”

Agnes took a seat on a wobbly bench across from Helen. “Yeah? Tired of what?”

“Tired of being tired.”

“Try hiking through the national forest to get here.”

“Not that kind of tired.”

Agnes nodded softly in understanding. “I know what you mean.”

“Our list is in the house,” Helen said. There were new conversation topics since the last time Agnes had visited, but Helen couldn’t recall exactly what they were anymore. “Remember, there were things you wanted to ask me—about Seattle, I think?”

“Yeah, concerts.” Agnes studied her with a touch of concern. “Hey, want to hear a song?” Agnes pulled earbuds and a music player from her jacket pocket and held them up.

In the last eighteen months, the only music Helen had heard was her instrumental records. She hesitated, then took the buds and put them in her ears. Agnes said the name of an artist Helen didn’t recognize, then explained he was a country singer.

A moment later, a fiddle started playing. The lyrics and melody were the opposite of how Helen felt: a guy and girl and a jukebox and last call at the bar. But the song reminded her how much she liked the crisp sound of a snare drum and the quick slide of a guitar and the rhyme of happier words, even if they no longer reflected her own life. When the last note faded, she sighed, but it wasn’t a happy sound. It was a heavy sound.

She took the earbuds out, and Agnes asked, “What’s going on, Helen?”

“Wade’s brother is visiting us.”

“What’s he like?”

“Terrible,” Helen said quietly.

“Oh.”

“Wade thinks his brother is dead,” Helen said. “Do you like Brussels sprouts?”

“Oh, um . . .” Agnes couldn’t hide her surprise at the abrupt change of subject. “Depends how you make ’em.”

“Depends for me too.” Helen’s gaze drifted toward the woods.

“So this thing with Wade’s brother?” Agnes said. “You mean one of his brothers died and another brother came here to tell you?”

“No, Wade just has the one brother.”

Agnes gave Helen a look of confusion.

Helen sighed. “There was some kind of accident. Wade said Isaac was killed in it. But then he shows up here.”

“So Wade lied about Isaac dying?”

“No, he believes that. He thinks Isaac is, you know . . .”

Agnes’s mouth opened. “A zombie?”

Helen gave her a look: Don’t be ridiculous. “No, not a zombie.” After a moment, Helen said, “A ghost.”

“What?” Agnes started to laugh, but then she saw Helen’s somber expression and stopped. As the silence stretched out, Agnes shifted uncomfortably on the bench. Finally, she asked, “Where’s your husband now?”

“Working in the trees.”

“Where’s his brother?”

“With him.” Helen shrugged to acknowledge the strangeness of it all.

Agnes leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. This story was getting more and more interesting. “So he’s happy then—that this brother is back from the dead?”

Helen laughed, but it was a humorless sound. “Oh no, he’s definitely not happy.”

“Is he scared of him?”

“Yes.”

“Are you?”

There was another stretch of silence before Helen answered. “Yes. But not in the same way.”

Agnes inhaled slowly, and Helen could see a million questions forming in the girl’s mind, so Helen said, “Isaac obviously isn’t dead,” to redirect the conversation. “It’s Wade that I’m worried about.”

“Yeah, I bet,” Agnes said. “What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s unwell.”

After a pause, Agnes asked, “Are you okay?”

Helen shook her head and looked off into the trees again. “I almost killed a man once, you know.”

Agnes sat up straight. “You did?”

“I wish I’d gone through with it.”

“I wish you had too.”

Helen turned back to Agnes, wide-eyed, and Agnes widened her eyes too.

“Sorry,” Agnes said quickly. “I don’t know why I said that. It was just the way you said it. It made me feel like whoever it was deserved to die.”

Helen smiled softly, but she could tell Agnes was about to start asking questions she didn’t want to answer. “I’m sorry,” Helen said as she felt tears gathering and tried to blink them back. “I guess I don’t really want to talk about any of this anymore.” A single tear escaped, and she wiped at her face. “Maybe we could just sit here together for a little bit?”

“Sure, of course,” Agnes said, and she settled back on the bench.

The two women sat there in the early afternoon breeze for over an hour, talking every now and then, but mostly just breathing the brisk, earthy aroma of the autumn woodlands. Helen drew comfort from having Agnes near, and it gave her a chance to think more clearly, and as she did, an idea dawned on her.

When Helen turned to Agnes, a spark of light was coming alive in her again. “Agnes, I need a favor.”

Agnes leaned forward, nodding. Of course, anything.

“Do you think you could get back here sooner rather than later?”

“Yeah, if you need me to. I could probably come in the next few days.”

“Okay then,” Helen said. “There’s something I want you to do for me when you get home.”

Chapter Thirty-Five

In the dark kitchen, Helen sat at the empty table, waiting.

It took over two hours before she heard the truck and then another minute before the front door opened and Wade and Isaac entered, dirty from a day’s work. They stopped when they saw her there.

“I didn’t make any food today,” Helen said.

“You didn’t make any food today?” Wade said.

“I didn’t make any food today,” she repeated.

Wade’s jaw clenched. He was hungry. “You didn’t make any food today.”

She shook her head. “I didn’t make any food today.”

“Jesus,” Isaac said. “How many times are you two going to say that?”

“I was planning on saying it as many times as he did,” Helen said.

“What am I supposed to eat?” Wade asked.

“That’s my question to you,” she said. “I told you I need to go into town for more supplies, and you told me I couldn’t use the truck.”

Wade stormed out of the room.

Isaac picked up the rags by the front door. As he wiped his boots with them, he looked at Helen circumspectly. “You don’t have any food in the garden?”

“I do. But there are worms in the garden.”

“What do you mean? Like an infestation?”

“No, just regular old garden worms.”

He tossed the rags on the floor by the door and crossed to the kitchen sink to wash his hands. When he reached for the hand towel, he whispered, “It’s going to be hard to drug him if you don’t give him food.”

Helen sighed. He was right.

Isaac set the towel on the counter and turned to face Helen. “There’s still food in the cellar.”

She rose from the table and approached him so they could speak in hushed tones. “I guess I do need to make dinner to give him the meds.”

“Honestly, I’m not sure he needs the meds.”

Her shoulders lifted a little. “Was he doing better today?”

Isaac shook his head. “I don’t know what game he’s playing, but Wade knows I’m not dead. I’m pretty sure he’s known this whole time.”

She recoiled at the thought. “Why do you say that?”

“Wade is controlling and manipulative. Always has been.”

“I don’t know . . .” Helen thought about it. Controlling, yes. But manipulative? It didn’t seem possible that Wade had been putting on a performance three nights ago in the bedroom when he’d told her Isaac was dead. If Wade was capable of lying that convincingly, it would mean anything and everything he’d ever told her could be a lie.

As if he could read her mind, Isaac said, “He never even told you I existed.”

“He didn’t really share much about his childhood. It’s possible that I asked, ‘Do you have any siblings?’ and he said, ‘No,’ and left it at that, and that’s not exactly a lie.”

Isaac gave her a look to indicate that it was a weak argument.

“If he believed you were dead,” Helen said, “that would mean he no longer had any living siblings, wouldn’t it? Omitting information that’s painful isn’t the same as lying, is it?” There were plenty of things she didn’t want to talk about with Wade. She was guilty of exactly the same thing.

“Do you really think he believes I’m dead?”

“Yes!” But after a moment, she added, “I think so, but I don’t really know.”

Isaac made a derisive sound. “So he just goes out to the trees and shoots the shit all day with his dead brother?”

“What?” Helen couldn’t hide the shock from her face, but she kept her voice low. “What do you guys talk about?”

“Anything, all day.”

“Both days you went out to the trees?”

“Not as much the first day. But yeah, all day today, we talked.”

“Did he try to talk to you about your soul moving on in peace, or anything like that?”

“My soul moving on?” Isaac laughed. “No.”

Suddenly feeling paranoid, Helen went to the opening that led into the living room and down the hall. She peered around the corner to make sure Wade wasn’t coming back before she said to Isaac, “He doesn’t act that way here. He barely talks to you at all.”

“That’s my point, Helen. He’s putting on a show here. For your benefit.”

“Why?”

“I couldn’t figure it out at first, but I’ve been thinking,” Isaac said. “Wade likes to play the white knight, but really, he just wants what he wants at any cost. Why do you think he keeps you out here all alone?”

“He doesn’t. He just likes the solitude and we make do and . . .” Helen stopped. Her words sounded hollow even to her. The last few trips to town, Wade had gone without her, and now he didn’t want her to go into town without him. Everything she did all day was in support of his efforts to manage the trees and live off the land.

“Did you ask him then?” she said.

“Ask him?” Isaac echoed.

“Yeah, if you think he’s lying to me, if you think he’s making this whole thing up about you being dead, why don’t you say something?”

“I thought about that too.” Isaac ran a hand through his hair absently. “But if I’m wrong, and he really is unstable and having delusions, I don’t know if confronting him is the best thing. We should keep drugging him and then when he’s thinking straight, we can convince him we need to take him to a doctor.”

“But what if you’re right and he’s lying?”

A long moment passed before Isaac answered. “If I’m right, I don’t know what he’s capable of.”

“You think he’s dangerous?”

Isaac looked away, shaking his head, but it didn’t appear to be a no. It seemed to be concerned disbelief.

She stepped back.

“Helen, I’m sorry,” he said. “It’ll be okay, but just be careful. Wade’s not a man who likes to be challenged by anyone. He sold the farm without even consulting me.”

Helen stilled. Because she’d always believed Wade to be an only child, she’d never considered the conditions of his inheritance. “You got half the money though, right?”

“I didn’t get a penny.”

Helen felt her breath quicken. Wade owed his brother money, and that brother was here now to collect. Everyone was playing a different side of some twisted game. She envisioned the tractor driving over the top of Isaac with Wade at the wheel of it. Had he wanted to eliminate Isaac to avoid sharing the inheritance? Wade had never seemed motivated by money, but maybe she was wrong about that too.

Quietly, she said, “You didn’t say anything about this before.”

Isaac shrugged. “It is what it is.”

Helen walked out of the kitchen and down the hallway. She found Wade in the bedroom removing his dirty work clothes.

“How are you getting along with Isaac?” she asked.

“He’s a ghost, and he hates me. We’re not getting along.”

“You spent all day together in the trees. Did you talk?”

“I tried, but he mostly just sat and watched me work with this look on his face.” Wade kicked off his pants, down to just his underwear now.

“What kind of a look?”

“Not a good one.” Wade stalked past her to the door. “I’m taking a bath.”

“But who will run the water for you?”

He ignored her and exited.

Helen stayed in the bedroom, thinking about the things Isaac had said. She didn’t know what unsettled her more: the notion that Wade might be lying to her or the notion that she’d been falling for it all this time.

Chapter Thirty-Six

The next morning in the garden, Helen squished all the nasty little cabbage worms between her fingers. She wasn’t going to burn the Brussels sprouts after all. Once she was done tending to all her garden tasks, she returned her garden tools to their spot without washing them like she usually did. She hesitated when she saw the handgun she’d hidden there. Wade and Isaac were in the trees again, so there would be no one here to see the gun or hear it fire.

Helen arranged empty cans on the wobbly bench in the side yard. She lined up her shot and pulled the trigger. A miss. It had been a while since she’d fired a gun.

She had almost twenty-four years to get ready to kill the masked man upon his release from prison. Plenty of time. So it shouldn’t have bothered her to miss as much as it did.

Helen took a deep breath, steadied her hand, and fired again. This time, she hit the can.

She spent the next half hour shooting cans off the bench, the stump, the rusty wheelbarrow, and the ladder, until she was confident she could hit a person as well as she could hit a can.

Then she reloaded the gun and hid it in the same spot again. Wade couldn’t be trusted with it.

During the day’s chores, Helen alternated between trying not to think about the kiss with Isaac and reliving it in her head.

Last night, she’d gone to bed as soon as the meds had made Wade sleepy and he’d sunk into the mattress. She’d put on her nightgown and climbed in next to him so she wouldn’t be “alone” in the house with Isaac. No more secret meetings. She was Wade’s wife; she needed to remember that. She had lain there in bed for at least two hours thinking about the kiss until she’d finally convinced herself to write it off as a moment of bad judgment. She was allowed those moments once or twice in her life, wasn’t she?

She was lucky, really. She lived in a time and place where she could make mistakes and not pay gravely for them. Women in history—the ones who actually lived the type of life Helen and Wade had contrived—often paid the steepest penalties for small indiscretions.

Helen had learned about that plenty in her favorite night class she’d taken at the university for her now-abandoned career change into the museum world. The class, “Victorian Era Mental Health Treatments in America,” had been so fascinating she’d sometimes curled up in bed at night and read beyond the assigned pages.

Often Tyler would lie beside her and listen as she’d paint him disturbing pictures of electroshock therapy, ice baths, and lobotomies for women who dared to challenge the status quo. A woman who was mad about the world might be labeled as the other kind of mad and forced into a treatment. Sometimes Tyler would ask questions or he’d joke that “these aren’t suitable bedtime stories,” but mostly he just listened as her voice filled their dim bedroom until, eventually, his eyelids would begin to flutter. She had apologized once. “Sorry, was I boring you?” she’d whispered. Eyes closed, already drifting, Tyler had smiled softly and said, “Never ever.”

Wade probably wished he could sign her up for a lobotomy. Especially now that he’d finally figured out how to run his own bath.

Dusk was just starting to fall when Helen went into the empty guest bedroom and placed a stack of clean clothes on the bed for Isaac. He was still wearing what he’d shown up in and would probably appreciate borrowing some clean things from Wade.

Then she went out to the front porch and sat in one of the rocking chairs and waited for the brothers to return as the sky dimmed from light gray to charcoal.

At last, the truck roared in and parked in a halting screech beneath the alder tree. Even before the doors opened, she could hear the raised voices of the men inside the cab. They tumbled out of the truck, yelling at each other.

“You aren’t blaming this on me!” Isaac shouted.

“Dad made me whip you because you were a lazy piece of shit!” Wade shouted back as he came around the front of the truck and got in Isaac’s face.

Helen stood and went to the edge of the porch. She’d only heard Wade this angry a few times.

“I didn’t want to be a fucking farmer like you and Dad,” Isaac spit out.

“There’s nothing wrong with farming.”

“It’s not my fault you were too dumb to do anything else. Even Ma knew you were dumb, she always said it.”

At that, Wade swung his fist. Helen heard it connect with Isaac’s face and saw his neck snap back.

“Wade!” she yelled. “Stop!”

Wade backed away from Isaac. Then he turned and thundered toward the house. He stomped past her and slammed through the front door.

In the yard, Isaac held his face for a moment before he approached, shoulders drooping.

“Are you okay?”

“He didn’t hit me that hard.” His voice was tight, but he sounded calm otherwise. “I’m okay.”

As Isaac walked up the porch steps, Helen said, “Let me see it.”

He lowered his hand, but in the dimness, there was no evidence of a bruise yet.

“Popped me right here.” He pointed at his right eye and smiled slightly.

“You’ll get a shiner.”

“Probably.” He sank into one of the rocking chairs.

“What was that about?” She sat down in the one beside him.

“He blames me for why he had to sell the farm. Because he couldn’t run it alone. But I wanted to do other things with my life, you know?”

“I understand.”

They looked out over the land in silence for a minute, and then Isaac said, “I was thinking about what you said when we were talking by the grave.”

Helen held her breath. The kiss. Was he going to bring it up? She had assumed they were in some kind of unspoken agreement to pretend the kiss didn’t happen.

“You said you feel like you’re outside the present moment,” he said. “Watching things happen.”

“I did say something like that, didn’t I?”

“I feel that way too.”

Helen looked over in surprise as Isaac continued. “I was curious, did you always feel that way? Or just since your first husband died?”

“Oh. No, I didn’t always feel that way,” she said softly. “Just since he died.”

Isaac nodded slowly. “I think I’ve always been that way. There’s a part of all this”—he gestured widely, as if to indicate everything—“that just feels like a game, you know?”

“Life, you mean?”

Isaac shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.”

This was a dangerous conversation. Helen could read between the lines. He was telling her he didn’t play by the rules, and she didn’t have to either.

She stood. “I’d better check on Wade.”

Inside their bedroom, Helen asked Wade what had happened, and he told her that Isaac had started threatening him on the drive home.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean just that, Helen. I’ve been trying to be a nice guy. What choice do I have? But he’s just fucking with me. On the way home, he asked me if I want to find out what it feels like to die at the hands of my own brother. Just like he did.”

She gave him a look. That wasn’t the conversation the brothers had been having in the yard. “It sounded like you guys were arguing about your parents.”

Wade threw his hands up, exasperated. “We were! Yeah, by the time we got back here, we were. Because I told him he should go on to the light, or the tunnel, or whatever or wherever it is. Heaven! Go be with our parents. And he said he hates our dad, and once he’s done here, he won’t be going where Ma is anyway.”

Whether he was lying to her or not, Wade was very agitated. That much was obvious. Helen just didn’t have the energy for it though. So after a moment, she simply sighed and said, “Should I make us something for dinner?”

With a harsh exhale, he sank onto the bed, dirty clothes and all, and said, “I want my food in here. I’m not in the mood to have dinner with a ghost tonight.”

Wade lay back against the pillows and folded his arms tightly across his chest. Helen couldn’t tell if she was witnessing a brilliant act or if he believed his own words.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Helen and Wade ate their meals in the bedroom, perched on chairs she’d carried in from the kitchen, plates in their laps. She’d apologized as she’d left Isaac alone at the table, but he’d said he understood; he didn’t feel like eating with his brother tonight either.

This was the third evening she’d held her breath as she’d watched Wade eat dinner, afraid that he would notice the bitterness of the antipsychotic powder. Tonight it hadn’t been as easy to disguise the taste since they’d only had Brussels sprouts and carrots sprinkled with parmesan to eat, and there was barely any parmesan left to mix with the meds.

Wade finished his vegetables quickly, though, his chomping filling the silence.

Putting his empty plate on the floor with a loud clatter, he said, “We’re apparently running out of food,” as if he’d just come to some important realization that Helen hadn’t already pointed out.

She pressed her lips into a thin line, and he left the room. A minute later, she heard the water in the pipes. He was running his own bath again.

Ever since Isaac had suggested that Wade was lying to her, Helen was seeing things differently. Wade could have all sorts of past lives of which she knew nothing. The first time they’d met, he’d said he was “small town,” as if that equaled honesty and integrity, and she’d taken his word for it. Now she didn’t know what to believe, but she knew that ever since Wade had claimed his brother was dead, her own mind had been pulling tricks on her. She couldn’t think straight anymore, and it was Wade’s fault.

Dirty plates in hand, she went back to the kitchen to ask Isaac if he had a cell phone. She desperately wanted to call her mother—just to hear the voice of someone who loved her unconditionally—but Isaac didn’t have a phone.

He asked, “Why doesn’t Wade take you to town?”

She replied, “I don’t want to go anywhere with him.”

At that, Isaac smiled faintly. Or maybe she just imagined it.

Hours later, Helen lay awake in bed next to Wade’s snoring form. Running everything through her head, yet again, was draining her. She may as well get up and read poetry.

She sat up and tossed the covers from her body, this time not bothering to be careful with the blankets. Wade didn’t stir though.

The chilly air touched her skin. She was behind on laundry—she was behind on everything—so tonight she was wearing a sleeveless summer nightgown, silken and almost sheer.

She dangled her feet over the edge of the bed into the black abyss below and lowered them to the floor, feeling her heart skip a little. But there was nothing. No dark hands. No evil lurking. Of course not.

She took a step forward, and suddenly a shadowy hand shot out and grabbed her back foot, tripping her. She fell to her knees, and the panic in her rose. On her hands and knees, she scrambled across the floor until she bumped up against the dresser. The dread was rising in her throat, but she had to know, she had to see it. She lowered her head to look, and it was the very worst thing.

There was Tyler, beneath the bed, blood soaking through his shirt, his face in agony, reaching his hand out toward her.

Helen covered her face and moaned into her hands.

When she finally uncovered her face, Tyler was gone.

“Tyler?” Her voice was barely a whisper, and she was met with silence. Suddenly, she wanted him back under the bed. Even if he was bleeding and reaching, at least he was there. “Tyler? Tyler, what did you want to tell me? When I left you there, I was coming back for you . . .”

It was useless. She would never get what she needed. She couldn’t spend another minute inside this house.

She stumbled out of the bedroom and down the hall into the kitchen. There, she pulled the first coat from the hook above the entry bench and threw it on, then shoved her feet into her shoes at the front door, not bothering to tie the laces. There was a lantern burning by the door and she didn’t even stop to consider how strange it was that the lantern was lit when she was sure she’d extinguished it before bed. She just grabbed it and ran outside into the cold midnight air. She wanted to scream—needed to scream—but if she did, it would wake up Isaac and maybe Wade too. So she took off running through the yard and across the meadow for the woods. She was going to run and run until she got far enough away from the farmhouse that neither of the men would be able to hear her scream.

It didn’t occur to her that she might need to call out for help in the woods that night. She was so fixated on running away from pain that it never occurred to her that she might be running into danger.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

The air was heavy and humid, as though a storm was closing in. The farther Helen disappeared into the trees, the more the scream built up inside her. She moved quickly, tripping on her untied shoelaces once and stumbling into a thick tree trunk, scraping her hands on the bark, almost dropping the lantern. She stayed there for a moment, breathing in the wood rot of the damp night.

She pulled the coat she was wearing more tightly around her and realized this time she had grabbed Wade’s.

Then she tied her shoes and pressed on.

She had a violent vision in her mind of her body plunging off the edge of a cliff, an unseen drop into a hidden lake she had found once somewhere in this direction, so icy and deep that it would finally be final. Searchers in orange vests would gather the next day, poking their long sticks into the brush. They might come upon the lake and wonder. But even if they swept the water and found her body, they’d never find her. All the things she never said and never did would stay with her in those deep, still waters, while all the things she felt would float away through time and space and find their way to Tyler.

Tyler, Tyler, Tyler.

Maybe she was already fading into a ghost. This was her last earthly walk, taking her into the next realm.

Something sharp hit against her bare leg and she cried out. Wade’s coat reached just under her hips, so anywhere below that was unprotected. Her nightgown went to her knees, so her lower legs were completely exposed to rough bushes and branches. She was sure she’d cut the front of her shin, and as she whimpered, it was the sound of her voice more than the pain in her leg that reminded her she was still alive, still here. So she screamed. God, it felt almost energizing to get it out. She wanted to run now, just run and run so the darkness couldn’t catch her. And just as she started to, she received a reply to her scream.

Helen skidded to a stop.

Not too far away, howling. It sounded like more than one coyote, but she knew that the way the trees bounced the sound could create that illusion. She tilted her head back and howled, then waited. More howling, and this time it definitely sounded like more than one.

Maybe she could find an entire pack!

She didn’t know what she wanted exactly. Wade had shown her how to haze a coyote by making noise and throwing rocks near it to scare it off, but no one had shown her how to join the pack.

She lifted her lantern and walked until she reached a small clearing with two coyotes in it. One was sitting and one was wandering restlessly around the other. In the distance, she heard more howling, and then she saw the seated coyote tilt its head back and answer the call with a low, long howl. It was two different packs communicating across the distance.

The second coyote, the fidgety one, turned and looked right at her. She was impressed by its size. It was larger than any coyote she’d ever seen before.

“Hi, I came to join you,” she said, and because she didn’t know what else to say or do, she set the lantern on the ground. It seemed disrespectful to be shining the light in the animal’s face. She was surprised the coyotes didn’t show any real reaction to her, no fear. Maybe they sensed she was one of them.

Helen stood there watching for several minutes until gradually the sense of a new invading presence came over her. It was the feeling of an ambush. She lifted the lantern from the ground, and as the glow passed over her legs, she saw her shin was bleeding where it had been cut. She spun in a slow circle, shining the light across the open expanse. A pack of coyotes was coming out of the woods and beginning to surround her.

This wasn’t right. This wasn’t what coyotes did.

Coyotes normally hunted smaller mammals. They only ate bigger prey, like elk, if they were lucky enough to find a carcass. They didn’t take down large animals alive, and yet, the way they were circling Helen right now made it clear they were the predators and she was the prey. They were going to take her down.

Perhaps they smelled the fresh blood on her leg.

There were almost a dozen of them, too many to haze, and they were so big too. She’d never seen coyotes so big with such broad faces. Something seemed different, and suddenly she realized what it was. These weren’t coyotes at all. These were wolves, which was impossible, because there weren’t any wolves in this part of the state.

But yes, they were here. Wolves.

One of the wolves bared its teeth and she took a step back. She didn’t have to look, but she knew the two behind her in the center of the clearing were coming closer too, she could feel it.

She lifted the lantern above her head and shook it back and forth. “Go away! Go home!” she shouted, nonsense words but desperate. “Go! Get!” She waved her other arm and stomped her foot.

This did nothing to deter their approach.

They were going to tear her to bits.

She dropped the lantern and took off Wade’s coat. As one of the wolves closed in, she shouted and swung the heavy canvas coat and hit its face. The wolf yelped and recoiled.

She continued to swing the coat around her body, to show the wolves that she was the aggressor and they should retreat, but instead it riled them up. They began to growl, and one of the wolves got hold of the coat with his teeth and ripped it from her hands.

She cried out as the coat was snatched away, and for a moment, everything went still as the wolves measured their new status. She picked up the lantern and shined it in their eyes. A couple of the wolves stepped back.

But then the largest wolf stepped closer.

She closed her eyes and felt regret in her heart. She didn’t want to die this way. They would eat her alive, rip the flesh from her torso while her heart was still beating. She’d feel the whole thing.

In her head, Helen said goodbye to the world.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Twenty-three months and five days ago

On Tyler’s last morning alive, he gave Helen a goodbye kiss in the elevator. Another man in the lobby had stepped in with them, and when other people were there, they usually skipped the kiss. But that day, Tyler stole it behind the back of the man in the elevator, then he slipped out to floor four as Helen continued to floor seven.

Several hours later, Tyler saw Helen for ten minutes while he ate his turkey sandwich. She had a lunch meeting with a client, so they could capture only a little pocket of time together in the enclosed glass area by the rooftop deck. By the time she got there, he’d already claimed a bench for them, and she strolled up to him with a laugh because she was bursting with a story about a coworker. She was a few months away from finishing her history degree at the University of Washington, and she was seeing everything in technicolor again.

Happy Helen was undoubtedly Tyler’s favorite Helen, but all versions of her were beloved. Even when she had gone through her darker days a couple of years earlier, when she’d felt like an endless winter storm, he’d never wanted to batten down the hatches against her. If she didn’t have it in her to be his sunshine, he still felt drawn to the pull of her dark night moon.

Those ten minutes sitting on the bench, chatting with Helen while the rain pattered on the panes above them, was the best part of Tyler’s last day at work. When he’d started to fall for her in the early days, when she’d looked into his eyes and saw the ocean in them, he’d known then that he’d tell her anything, take her everywhere, follow her anywhere. But in many ways, it didn’t matter to him if that was the rooftop deck in their office building or some faraway locale. As long as she was there, that’s where he wanted to be.

Sometimes, though, they were both so busy it felt like the hours got swept out to sea with their jobs and errands and to-dos. The constant comfort was that, by the end of the day, he knew they would always float back to each other like messages in a bottle.

That evening, while Helen was at night class, Tyler went to the gym and used the elliptical machine. Then he stopped at the grocery store on his way back to the apartment to get milk, lettuce, and paper towels.

The moment Tyler heard Helen’s key in the front door, his heart lifted. Every time she walked through that door, an empty apartment became a home again. Her hair was damp from the rain, and any minute she would probably proclaim that she looked like a “drowned rat,” but he thought she looked adorable. There was a bakery box in her hand, and he knew it would either be rainbow chip cake (his favorite) or lemon cake (hers).

It was rainbow chip. Of course.

They ordered Chinese takeout, ate the cake, and cuddled on the couch while they watched a TV show. He briefly contemplated initiating sex, but he was tired that night and could tell she was too, so he didn’t.

Except for the fact that Tyler would be murdered that night, it was an inconsequential November Tuesday.

There were so many days Tyler had shared with Helen that would have made for an exciting or poignant last day. They’d hiked to the top of Mount Adams, they’d volunteered to plant trees in Seattle’s urban spaces, and they’d pulled a drowning man into their kayak on Lake Washington. For one of his birthdays, they’d sat front row at a Sex Pistols tribute concert, and Helen had made a point to sing along with some of Tyler’s favorite lyrics. For one of their anniversaries, she’d written him a poem that gave him a lump in his throat and tears in his eyes. And one summer, they’d taken a road trip to the California coast and she’d gone down on him at a Big Sur lookout point inside a parked convertible they’d rented for the day. It didn’t get much better than a pink sunset and the waves crashing against the rocks while the waves crashed even bigger inside him.

There were so many memorable days together.

But mostly, there were ordinary days where they were simply grateful to have each other.

If Tyler had known it was to be his last day, he would have done only a few things differently. He would have initiated sex, and he would have had pizza and purple grapes for lunch, and most importantly, he would have spent every second of that day with Helen, looking into her eyes and listening to her talk. She was his favorite person, and he was hers. Some things are that simple.

Chapter Forty

Present day

Helen was sure she was going to die, and she was sure it was going to be bloody and painful. But if Tyler could endure a violent death, so could she. That’s when she heard the strange flap, the wings of something flying, but it was so much louder than a normal bird. She opened her eyes to a flash of black in the air, and she heard the word, Run, as plainly as if someone had said it in her ear.

So she did.

She took off across the clearing. She couldn’t pump her arms freely with the lantern in her hand, so she dropped it, letting the moon guide her. She heard growls and barks, and she knew she was being pursued. Any moment, teeth were going to bite her nightgown and pull her body to the soft earth and begin the assault on her flesh. At least she would die running though.

One of the wolves appeared beside her and lunged. In the darkness she couldn’t see the details of it, but she could imagine its sharp teeth, and she lifted her knee and felt it smack the front of the wolf’s body. It yelped, and she staggered and ran on. In the next instant, multiple black shapes curved in front of her, forcing her to whirl to the left, like a frightened sheep. Those shapes seemed to hold their position as she ran, but there were new sounds now of growling at her feet, a sickly expectation in the pit of her stomach that her ankles were about to be gashed open.

But then, somehow, she reached the tree line at the clearing—it was unbelievable they hadn’t caught her yet—and she started weaving through the trees. It was so dark she was going on instinct, letting the forest lead her, and she no longer heard the growls.

She didn’t dare look back until, at last, she broke out of the trees and into the meadow behind the farmhouse. Her legs were burning and she was out of breath, but she ran with everything that was left until she reached the front door.

Inside the kitchen, she fell to her knees: heart pounding, chest burning, crying. It was the first time in a very long time that she had openly wept. God, she was so stupid. What had she been thinking?

Still sobbing, Helen sat back to examine the cut on her leg. The scrape wasn’t too terrible but still deeper than she expected. She pulled herself to her feet and went to the sink, where she got a white hand towel from the cupboard. She dampened the towel and used it to clean the cut, her blood staining the towel red.

As the tears ran freely down her face, a new feeling started to take over. Somehow, she had outrun wolves. She knew on the one hand it was impossible—both the presence of wolves and outrunning them. Already she was questioning if it had really happened, and yet she felt a deep and powerful strength spreading through her body, a disturbing kind of exhilaration unlike anything she’d ever felt. And whose voice had that been in the woods telling her to run? She wished it had been Tyler’s voice but knew it wasn’t. The memory of it—Run—was nagging at her. It had felt so familiar.

And suddenly, she knew.

Isaac.

That had been his voice.

Thinking, she set aside the hand towel. Likely it had been her own voice she’d heard, but because Isaac had taken up residence in her mind, in her moment of terror, she had drawn strength from imagining his voice.

Isaac.

Desire flooded in, dark but insistent, demanding that she act upon it. Ever since Isaac had shown up, he’d been spinning her, expertly separating her desire from her sense of loyalty, and now he held on to her desire. Subterfuge by centrifuge.

Helen untied her shoes and stepped out of them. She peeled her socks off and tossed them aside too. All she wore now was the silk sleeveless nightgown with a pair of cotton underwear beneath it.

She glided across the kitchen, feeling the lightest she’d felt in so long, through the living room and down the hallway. Outside the guest bedroom, she hesitated for only a second. Then she opened the door and stepped inside. There was a candle still burning faintly on Isaac’s bedside dresser, the flame almost out. Its faded orange glow danced against the wall.

She took in Isaac’s sleeping form, motionless under the blankets.

She moved toward the bed, but as she reached it, she realized he wasn’t in it. It was just a rumple of blankets.

The room was empty.

Not for long though.

When Isaac stepped up behind Helen, she didn’t hear the floorboards creak, didn’t hear him breathing, but she knew he was there. She could feel the nearness of his body calling to hers. She turned her head just slightly in acknowledgment, and he stepped closer and lifted her hair. He kissed her neck, and she briefly wondered if it tasted salty. She had just run over a mile and could feel a light sheen of sweat all over her body.

She closed her eyes and leaned back against him, feeling his body through the thin fabric of her nightgown. Her hair fell back around her shoulders as his hands moved to her thighs, then to her waist, and then just below her breasts as he felt the shape of her.

Helen spun around to face him. Even though the room was dark, she could still see that his eyes had no trace of doubt in them. It seemed cruel that he could be so sure of this, but she pushed the thought away. She had almost died in the woods tonight. She reached up to touch his cheek.

Isaac turned his face into her hand. For a long time, all she could feel was the softness of his lips against her palm and the rise and fall of her chest on a never-ending breath.

And then she wrapped her arms around him and put her mouth on his. Ever since their kiss in the yard two nights ago, she’d been circling the moment, waiting for it to come back around, knowing it would, even as she had told herself it wouldn’t.

She was tired of being tolerated.

She wanted to be craved in a way that blocked out everything else in the world.

As Isaac returned the kiss, his hands moved down her body. He lifted her, and she wrapped her legs around his waist. He carried her to the bed and sat down on the edge of it with her on top. His hands grappled with her nightgown, pushing it up around her hips.

“Are you sure?” Isaac asked.

He didn’t mean it, that she could tell. Oh, he’d stop of course if she said to, but he didn’t really care about Wade or even what it might do to her. She had an uneasy collision of feelings—guilt, fear, desire—and it made her angry. All of it. Her life made her angry, so she pushed Isaac flat on his back and pulled up his shirt. Her hands traced the scar on his stomach. He’d almost died too. They were part of a survivors’ club.

Isaac pulled her head to his and kissed her. Then suddenly he sat up again and stood, lifting and turning quickly to set her on the center of the bed. He climbed on top of her, his head hovered inches from hers, and she closed her eyes. This felt like the last moment to say Stop, never mind, sorry, I was wrong. But already it was too good. She couldn’t walk away.

Helen opened her eyes and inhaled sharply. Isaac’s eyes: They had turned pure black.

He stilled, watching her carefully. The moment was a question. Helen closed her eyes again and answered by reaching for him. She pulled his face into her neck and told herself she hadn’t seen what she had—or maybe she didn’t care even if she had—and when he lifted his head again his eyes looked normal, and she almost believed her own lies.

When he finally entered her, he went very slowly, but it wasn’t her sense that he was being careful, watching her for signs and giving her time to adjust. She sensed it was because he was savoring a leisurely kind of ownership over her. He smiled down at her, and it was dark and victorious, and she didn’t know if it turned her on more or made her mad. God, both.

She dug her fingernails into his back. She had no idea if he liked that, but she didn’t really care. They moved together and it was sweet and only a little sharp, so she pulled him deeper into her, harder.

She didn’t want it to feel like a whisper. She wanted it to feel like a shout.

Her sheer nightgown had been pushed up around her chest—somehow it had never made it over her head—and it was an afterthought of silk caressing her neck as Isaac’s hands found her breasts and squeezed and then moved down to her waist until finally he gripped her hips so she felt tethered to the bed as he moved in and out of her, steady, forceful, as if this transgression had been his right all along.

Eventually, Helen pushed up against his chest and said, “I want to be on top,” and they moved into that position. That was the only thing spoken during the entire encounter, but so many words flashed through her mind, some of them dirty and delicious and some of them desperate and devastating.

As she rode him, she felt the pressure building inside of her. Through the darkness, she could see his gaze roaming up and down her body and she could tell he was getting close too. His hands grabbed on to her, tried to change her rhythm to what he needed, and she pressed one hand lightly to his throat to tell him to stop and he immediately obeyed. It was his fast acquiescence that pushed her closer. Keeping her hand on his throat—because she was still a little mad and it felt a little good—she lowered her head. That’s when she saw the blood on the white sheets next to her. She immediately thought of the virgins through the centuries, losing their innocence in arranged marriages they never wanted. It took her a moment to understand what her blood was doing on these sheets, and then she remembered the cut on her leg and the wolves in the woods and Isaac’s voice commanding her:

Run.

She pressed her hand harder against his throat and felt herself come.

Chapter Forty-One

Afterward, Helen and Isaac rolled apart, and as she caught her breath, she became acutely aware that she was just down the hall from her sleeping husband. The anger had drained away, now replaced with a feeling of satisfaction unlike any she’d ever felt before. It was dark and shadowy and strange. This was how villains were made.

Helen looked over at Isaac. He was lying on his back, body relaxed, having found his own release shortly after hers, eyes on the ceiling. She still tasted desire in her mouth, but it was an ambivalent kind now, mixed with shame.

She sat up, and he looked at her and smiled lazily. She pulled her nightgown down over her thighs. The silk was terribly wrinkled from being shoved into a mess above her waist and pressed between their bodies. She didn’t know where her underwear had landed. They weren’t among the twisted rumple of sheets.

Helen stood up but she didn’t see her underwear on the floor next to the bed either. Her eyes roamed the dark space, then saw Isaac was pointing to the far side of the room. She went around the bed and found them on the floor near the wall.

As she pulled them on, she didn’t look at him. Then she smoothed the silk of her nightgown but it was useless. She gave him a quick smile before starting toward the door.

He pushed himself upright and whispered, “Come here.”

She stopped. “What?”

“Come here.”

So she went to the edge of the bed, and he grasped the front of her nightgown and pulled her down for a kiss.

Kissing him felt different to her now that she knew what it was like to have him inside her, and the softness of his lips and taste of him filled her with a new wave of longing. If she weren’t feeling so anxious about what had just happened and what it meant for her and her marriage, if she were just operating on desire alone, she would have crawled back on top of him. But instead, she pulled away from the kiss. “I have to go.”

And she left.

Helen didn’t return to her bedroom that night. She couldn’t sleep next to Wade after what she had done. She wrapped herself in a blanket from the couch and fell asleep there.

In the morning, she awoke to Wade’s hands shaking her. He stood over her with a grim expression. “What are you doing out here?”

She looked up into his eyes and felt a wave of guilt. She thought, I’m definitely the villain now.

“I fell asleep reading,” she said.

Wade looked down at the Edgar Allan Poe book on the coffee table. Before curling up on the couch, Helen had set it there to support her cover story.

“Why is there a bloody towel in the kitchen?”

“Oh.” She had forgotten to tend to the hand towel. “I cut my leg when I went outside. I thought I heard something in the shed.” She lifted the blanket to show him the cut on her shin. It was already starting to scab over.

Wade shook his head. In his mind, more nonsense. “Do you know where my coat is?”

The wolves took it. “No.”

Wade stomped out of the house, and Helen sat up, absorbing the silence.

After a moment, the guest room door opened, and Isaac emerged. He was wearing the clean work clothes she had given him yesterday. Wade’s clothes. That seemed very wrong now.

As Isaac walked down the hall toward her, he stared at her. She stared back, not blinking, not smiling, but simply marveling at the fact that hours earlier she had let this man own her body. As he passed through the living room, his eyes never left hers and then he was gone too. The sound of the front door closing echoed through the house.

Helen heard the truck start outside and listened as it pulled away. How absurd that Wade had just waited in the truck for Isaac. That was just more proof he’d been lying to her this entire time when he said that Isaac was a ghost. Who waited in their truck for a ghost to ride shotgun with them?

Isaac sure hadn’t felt like a ghost last night. Helen had been unable to read his expression as he left the house just now, but she too had been expressionless. She didn’t know what she wanted or expected from him. Nothing, perhaps. If anything, she simply felt relief that the house was empty right now, so she could be alone. She had a lot of thinking to do.

First, though, she needed to do some laundry. Helen rose from the couch and went to the door of the guest room. Isaac had opened the curtains, and morning light was streaming into the room. The bed was still a twisted mess of blankets. Every other morning, he had neatly made his bed. This could only be a message to her.

Perhaps an indictment: You did this. You are disgraceful.

Perhaps a celebration: We did this. It was divine.

Or perhaps an invitation: Come back to me.

She walked to the bed and flipped back the blanket and top sheet. She looked down at the streak of blood she’d left across the white linen and felt a tightness in her throat. Laundry soap may or may not get the blood out. Some stains were forever. She’d just have to do her best.

The men came home late that evening, so much later than usual. Helen was sitting by the burning fireplace when the brief sweep of headlights lit up the living room window. A clothesline was strung up in front of the fireplace, attached to nails driven into two corners of the room, and the drying bed sheet hung from it. The day had been cold and full of rain showers, which meant Helen’s clothesline outside was useless. She hoped Wade didn’t question why she’d washed the sheets from the guest room or ask about the faded red stain.

All day as she did chores, Helen had been able to think about what she had done and where she should go from here. She had reached no conclusions, so eventually she’d stopped thinking so hard and instead trudged through the rest of the day with her head down, feeling the walls spying on her. They knew too much.

Warily, she now stood and walked into the kitchen to greet the men. She hadn’t made dinner because there was so little food left in the house, and because she couldn’t imagine the three of them sitting around the dinner table together. What had previously been uncomfortable now seemed unfathomable.

The front door opened, and Wade and Isaac entered, carrying several bags of food. Isaac gave Helen an apologetic expression as he set his bags on the kitchen table.

She turned to Wade. “You went into town.” The accusation was apparent in her voice.

“Yeah, I told you I was going to.” Wade set his bags down. “We needed food.”

“We used to go into town every month together.”

Wade shook his head. “It wasn’t a joyride, Helen. It was an errand so we could eat.”

“You know I need to call my mother. I’m sure she wonders how I am.”

“You said your mother’s tedious.”

“So?”

“So that’s what you said,” Wade said in a dismissive tone.

“So what if I said she’s tedious? She’s my mother. I’m allowed to think whatever I want about her and still want to talk to her! Those aren’t mutually exclusive concepts!”

Wade glanced at Isaac. He didn’t like that Helen was challenging him in front of his brother. More evidence that Wade knew Isaac wasn’t a ghost. Nobody cared about a ghost’s opinion of their marriage dynamic.

God, her husband was a liar. This is what happened when you married a man after knowing him for only three months and then you moved far away from every person you’d ever loved. One day you woke up and realized he was a liar and you were a fool.

Wade shrugged. “Isaac said you told him you didn’t want to go into town.”

Helen drew in a sharp breath and looked at Isaac. He said nothing, just held her gaze, and she suddenly felt he was toying with her somehow too.

“Have fun making dinner,” Helen said, and she walked out of the room.

Chapter Forty-Two

Helen ended up in the bedroom, pacing furiously. She wished she’d stormed away in the other direction, out the front door instead of back here, even if it meant being outside with the wolves. Now she was marooned in the bedroom.

Or was she? She stopped pacing.

No, she wasn’t. Not if she didn’t want to be. She could march out to the kitchen and snatch the keys to Wade’s truck from the hook by the door and drive herself into town. In fact, she could keep driving through the night until she arrived in the city.

Seattle. It sounded like a foreign land now, a place where she no longer spoke the language. Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.

Helen looked down and sighed, and that’s when she saw that the bandage she’d wrapped around her shin was beginning to show red. The cut was bleeding through again.

She went into the hallway, intending to clean up in the bathroom, but stopped short as Isaac exited the guest bedroom.

“Don’t be mad,” he said quietly.

“I’m not mad.” Her voice came out clipped.

He gave her a look that said he knew better. “You said you didn’t want to go anywhere with Wade.”

She looked away. Yes, she had said that, but Isaac had also known how badly she wanted to call her mother and how long it had been since she’d been to town.

Isaac drew closer to her. “And honestly, the thought of the three of us going into town together, spending that time alone in the truck . . .” He trailed off and gave her the pained expression of a remorseful man.

Helen wasn’t sure she believed him. His confession felt like lines from a stage play he’d rehearsed. “You didn’t seem to feel so bad last night.”

“Neither did you.”

“You have no idea how I feel.”

Isaac took a step closer. “So tell me.”

The slight movement of air between them electrified her, and the angry feeling was replaced instantly with the desire to reach for him. Instead, she stepped back and was met with the wall.

He closed in and put his hands on her waist. Helen could hear Wade turn on the faucet in the kitchen.

“Do you regret last night?” Isaac whispered.

Helen didn’t answer for a long time, until finally she shook her head no.

Isaac reached up and twisted a strand of her hair around his finger, twirling and twirling until it was tight. Then he tugged, sending a spark of pain to her scalp, and she gasped a little. Then she stopped breathing altogether.

He smiled at her reaction, and she learned a thing or two about him in that moment.

Helen heard a kitchen chair scrape on the kitchen floor. She needed to end this exchange. She cleared her throat and said, “I’m bleeding.”

Isaac’s smile deepened. “That’s okay, Helen. I don’t mind. Having your blood on me would turn me on.”

It took her a second to comprehend his misunderstanding. “Not that kind of bleeding,” Helen said, and she watched him blink slowly. “My shin.”

He looked down, and the self-satisfied smile on his face changed to an amused one. “Oh, I see,” he said. He looked up and his eyes were dancing. “Either way.”

“Helen!” Wade shouted.

Helen shoved Isaac back and stepped away from the wall, expecting to see Wade at the end of the hall, but he wasn’t there. His voice had carried from the kitchen.

Without looking at Isaac again, she hurried to the kitchen and found that Wade had unpacked the groceries from the bags but left everything on the counter instead of putting things away.

Wade gestured at the food. “I don’t know what you want to make.”

Still a little breathless, she moved past him and began rummaging through the food, for once grateful to be making dinner, grateful for the distraction.

“Your leg is bleeding,” Wade said.

“Oh, right. Um . . .” Helen didn’t want to go back into the hall again in case Isaac was still there.

“I’ll get something for it,” Wade said, and he left the room.

When he returned, he tended to the cut with a wet washcloth, then dried it with a second clean cloth.

As he carefully rebandaged it for her, Helen almost started to cry.

Seated between the two men, Helen used her fork to push the rice, beans, and pork around on her plate. It was the first decent meal they’d had in days, but she had no appetite.

She turned to Isaac and asked, “How much longer do you think you’ll be staying with us?”

“I don’t know,” Isaac said, and Wade made a sound in his throat that was barely audible but in the silence of the house, they could all hear it.

Isaac smiled softly at her. “However long you’ll have me.”

Have me. Helen felt the heat in her face and looked down at her food, afraid Wade would see it.

“But don’t worry, Helen,” Isaac said. “I promise you won’t have to cook for three much longer.”

Under the table, she felt a boot come to rest gently against her stocking foot. An inch farther and it would have crushed her toes. She looked from one man to the other, but neither met her eyes as they ate their food. Whoever it was probably couldn’t even feel her foot through the thick leather of their shoe.

She pulled her foot back, and as soon as she did, Isaac looked at her. He raised an eyebrow.

She put her fork down. Her meal was almost untouched, but she felt that if she ate another bite she might get sick.

“This is good, Helen,” Wade said as he swallowed around a bite.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

There were no drugs in Wade’s dinner tonight. If he was spinning deliberate lies about Isaac instead of experiencing true delusions, the drugs wouldn’t help.

But even more so, there was no way Helen could have watched her husband eat a drugged dinner after she’d slept with his brother.

Chapter Forty-Three

“Wade, is Isaac here for his half of the money?”

Helen stood in front of the closed bathroom door, and Wade sat in a bathtub full of water, cornered, wet, and naked. Not so easy for him to walk away in a huff and avoid the conversation. He stopped scrubbing his shoulders and looked at her coolly.

“His half of the money?” he repeated.

“From the sale of the farm.”

“What’s a ghost going to do with money?”

“Oh, God, Wade. Will you stop it?” she snapped.

“Not that this matters, because Isaac was dead when I sold it,” Wade said, “but I owned the farm one hundred percent when he was alive too. My dad was old school and put it all in the oldest son’s name.”

Helen’s eyes narrowed. If the title had really been in Wade’s name, that meant he wouldn’t have had a motive to try to eliminate Isaac to inherit it all.

Wade took in her expression and said, “You don’t believe me?”

“Honestly, I don’t know what to think at this point.”

She gave him a tired stare and went into their bedroom.

Only a minute later, Wade entered, towel around his waist and rivulets of water running down his legs, wet footprints left behind on the hardwood floor as he stalked to the closet. He started digging through it, grumbling under his breath. Helen watched him curiously.

Finally, he found a briefcase and tossed it on the bed. It was old brown leather, fraying at the edges. She knew it held papers and things of his, but she’d never examined its contents. He snapped it open and shuffled through it, water dripping from his hair onto the papers.

“Here, here. Look!” he said, and he handed her a paper.

She scanned the document. “Okay, fine. So I can see you owned the farm alone.” It was the deed to the property from when his father had died fourteen years prior, and it was in his name only.

Wade snatched the paper back from her. “And good for that, because it shows I didn’t stand to gain anything financially from Isaac dying. Otherwise, maybe the cops would have tried to pin an accident on me.”

He tossed the deed back inside the briefcase.

Helen watched him warily. Regardless of which brother held the deed to the property, it seemed only fair to her that they should split any inheritance.

She worded her next question carefully. “Had Isaac not . . . died, would you have given him half of the money from the farm?”

Wade snapped the briefcase shut. “Honestly, I don’t know, Helen. In case you can’t tell, I don’t like my brother all that much. And not just because he’s haunting me.”

Ten o’clock.

Eleven o’clock.

Midnight.

As Helen lay in bed next to Wade’s sleeping form, she knew that Isaac was waiting for her in his room. She could feel it in her body, floating and falling on these new and mysterious tides. She could feel it in the pull of the moon from the night sky. She could feel it because she knew Isaac was feeling it too. The circle had completely closed around her.

Isaac, Isaac, Isaac.

One o’clock.

She wouldn’t go to him though.

She couldn’t do it again. One time was a mistake. Two times made her a calculated adulteress.

Two o’clock.

Helen ran her hands over the front of her wrinkled silk nightgown, the memory of what had caused those wrinkles still vivid from the night before. She wished she were wearing one of her regular nightgowns, but strangely, she hadn’t been able to find either of her two long-sleeved ones in the laundry hamper when she had gotten ready for bed. She hadn’t asked Wade if he’d seen them, because she didn’t want to draw attention to how wrinkled the silk one was. Helen had been so distracted lately, perhaps she had washed them without remembering and accidentally put them away with the kitchen linens or bedding. She would have to search for them tomorrow when the men were gone. When she had pulled on the silk nightgown again, she’d felt as though she were displaying her scarlet letter.

Beneath the silk nightgown, she wore a pair of black silk panties. There had been a clean pair of beige cotton underwear in her dresser right next to them, but she had reached for the black silk.

Three o’clock.

Helen finally drifted to sleep and awoke with a start shortly thereafter. It must have been the faint noise of the door opening, the hall light shining into the room. She sat up in bed and saw him.

Isaac stood at the threshold of the bedroom door, backlit, so all she could see was his silhouette. She shook her head, but he didn’t move from the spot.

“Go,” she whispered.

To her surprise, he did. A moment later, the hallway went dark.

Helen felt a mixture of relief and disappointment.

She waited a minute before she got out of bed to close the door. As she reached for it and began to push it shut, Isaac’s hand closed around her wrist.

Part of her knew he would be waiting just outside the door. Part of her knew if she went to close the door, this would happen.

She let him pull her into the hallway. Each of his hands encircled each of her wrists, so lightly that she wished it were more pressure.

“I thought you’d come see me,” Isaac said.

“I can’t do this.”

“And yet you are.”

“No, we did. Past tense,” she said. “But now we can’t. Present tense.”

“It’s kind of hot when you lecture me on my grammar.”

It was one of the few times she’d heard Isaac make a joke, and it caught her off guard so much that it made her laugh. She quickly stemmed the sound of her laughter, worried Wade would hear.

Isaac pressed his lips to her ear. “That’s so pretty,” he whispered. “I want to hear you laugh again.”

She shook her head, as if to say no, but really she just wanted to feel her ear brush against his lips again.

“Come into my bedroom and I promise I’ll make you laugh,” he said.

It was the promise of laughter that did her in. Here was a glimmer of light that might pull her back from the darkness. As she looked into Isaac’s eyes, she decided she was either going to move toward this consolation with him right now, or next time she wouldn’t shoot the gun at the sky. Next time she’d keep it aimed at her own head.

“Okay,” she whispered.

As it were, Isaac did not actually make Helen laugh in bed. It takes a certain kind of playfulness for laughter during sex, and Isaac wasn’t playful in that way.

He played in a different way. Just as they would settle into a rhythm of one kind and she began to feel sheltered inside one particular sensation, one particular emotion, he would change everything. She’d find herself in another position, experiencing a rush of something else.

This went on for some length of time until Helen finally realized tears were running down her face. Isaac was spooning her from behind, moving into her, gently, languidly.

Then, without warning, he moved and pulled her on top of him. He gripped her hips so solidly that she couldn’t move as he drove up into her, and it was suddenly too much, all these abrupt changes. They made her feel as if every emotion she’d ever had was going to start spilling out of her.

Helen put the flat of her hand against Isaac’s cheek. When he opened his eyes and looked at her, she lifted her hand away from his face, only a few inches, and brought it back to his cheek. A firm tap more than a slap.

“You can hit me,” he said, still moving up into her.

She shook her head. No.

“Hit me,” he repeated.

His voice sounded like a taunt. He moved into her deeper, hard enough that it was starting to hurt.

She tried to lift her body slightly, to give herself a respite, but Isaac didn’t loosen his grip. Instead, he said, “I want you to hit me,” and as he thrust his hips up, he pulled hers down very hard.

She gasped at the pain and saw him smile in return.

So she slapped him hard across the face, and moments later, she watched him come.

They rolled apart, and Helen listened as Isaac caught his breath. She waited for him to say something to check on her. She planned to do the same, maybe apologize for hitting him so hard, though from his reaction it seemed obvious he’d liked it.

But instead, he drifted to sleep.

The blood rushed to her face. She didn’t mind that he had come first, and she was okay with hitting him—maybe even kind of liked it—so long as he liked it. But she knew he had seen her crying, and he hadn’t asked her if she was okay, hadn’t asked if he’d pushed her too far, hadn’t asked if she wanted him to pleasure her another way after he’d finished. No, he’d just fallen asleep, sprawled out on his back.

Her head felt heavy and sick. She could blame it on the wolves, blame it on the dark, or blame it on her entire life falling apart two years ago, but it wouldn’t change all these wrong turns. She threw back the covers and swung her legs over the side of the bed. Fine then, this is what she deserved.

Immediately, Isaac’s hand found hers and clasped it, preventing her from standing.

“Don’t go,” he said. “I haven’t taken care of you.”

“It’s okay,” Helen said, but her tone was sharp.

His hand moved to her stomach and slowly began to reach lower. She pushed it away, and he pulled his hand back.

Silence.

Finally, he asked, “What do you want, Helen?”

Oblivion. Peace. Quiet. Noise. Revenge. Joy. Excitement. Death. “Will you just hold me?”

Helen felt the weight shift on the bed and then Isaac was behind her, pulling her against his body. She closed her eyes and let him wrap her up in his arms, feeling weightless as he gently settled their bodies back onto the bed.

“I only came here to see my brother. I had no idea it would turn out like this,” Isaac whispered into her ear. “It’s been more fun than I expected.”

Helen had no response. Fun is not the word she would have chosen.

She stayed there in Isaac’s arms as long as she could afford to, and then she slipped away, back to her bedroom before the sun rose.

Chapter Forty-Four

The next morning when Wade woke up, Helen pretended to be asleep next to him. She kept her eyes closed as she felt his weight leave the mattress, and she lay still as she listened to the screech of the dresser drawer, then the ruffle of cloth against his bare skin as he pulled on his pants, then his shirt, then his socks.

She stayed in bed until she heard his truck pull away. She didn’t want to face either of them. Wade was not a good husband, but Isaac was not a good man. She wasn’t deluding herself into thinking she was a good woman, but at least she could recognize now that things were broken beyond repair.

She sat up slowly in bed and thought of all the women trapped in past centuries who’d been thrown into asylums for daring to lose their mind to grief or hopelessness or anger, or even desire. This was her asylum here, and she needed to get out.

As she crossed the bedroom, her body felt unmoored, as if it didn’t belong to her anymore. Her arms heavy, her legs twisted, her head floating. Her stomach was hollow, and she realized suddenly she was very hungry. She’d barely eaten anything in the last couple of days.

First, food. Then, escape plans.

Helen walked toward the front of the house, feeling as though the hallway had never been so long and narrow, the walls had never pressed in on her so much. As she rounded the corner into the kitchen, something dark flew through the air, practically hitting her in the head. She ducked just in time and the object thudded against the wall.

A raven lay there on the floor, its body at a broken angle. Her mouth dropped open. The raven gave one last twitch before it went lifeless. She thought of two nights ago in the clearing with the wolves. Just before she had heard the word run, there had been a flash of black, the sound of wings. Of course, it had been a raven with her then too.

She went to the sink to get the stained hand towel. Another bird to bury. The birds were circling her now too.

But when Helen turned back, the dead bird was gone and in its place was her Poe book, lying open to the poem “The Raven.” She stared at it, a hidden door in her brain cracking open.

Helen brought the book to the table and sat down with it. She read the poem slowly, carefully, pausing to reread one particular line:

“And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming . . .”

Helen looked up from the book. It all made terrible sense now.

“Holy shit.”

Still in her wrinkled silk nightgown, Helen carried a piece of wood toward the house. She was freezing, her bare legs exposed to the October morning, but she couldn’t find any reason to get dressed either. Now that she’d put the pieces together, her decision to escape seemed pointless.

After she got a small fire going in the kitchen’s wood stove, she lay down on the floor in front of it. This was how she would fade away. She didn’t need a gas oven like Sylvia Plath. She just needed to wait for the dark and the ravens and the wolves to come for her.

She was unaware of how much time had passed before she heard a soft rapping on the front door. She sat up, resigned to it. Now comes the fall, she thought. It would be a final plunge into whatever this was.

She stood, despondent in her movements. When she opened the front door, she found Agnes standing on the porch in her hiking clothes and gear, stone-faced. The girl’s normal smile and enthusiastic energy were missing.

“Oh, it’s you,” Helen said, puzzled.

“Are they here?” Agnes whispered.

Helen just looked at her.

“Your husband and his brother,” Agnes said.

“No.”

Agnes entered and nervously glanced around the room as if she were taking stock of what was in it.

“Have you ever met my husband?”

Agnes gave Helen a confused expression. “No, you know I haven’t.”

“I didn’t think so. Why is that?”

“Bad timing, I guess.”

Helen pulled out a chair and gestured. “Have a seat.”

Agnes hesitated. “Where are they?”

“Gone for the day.”

That answer seemed to satisfy Agnes, and she sat down. Helen took the chair across from her.

Agnes said, “I looked up what you asked me to.”

“Me first,” Helen said. “Are you familiar with Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’?”

“Um . . . no?”

The Poe book was still on the table, open to the poem. Helen pushed the book in front of Agnes, and the younger woman looked down at it, her nose scrunching.

“I don’t have time to read this,” Agnes said. “I did what you asked. I need to show you.” She reached into her hiking waist pack. She pulled out a manila envelope that was folded in half.

Helen ignored her. “The narrator in the poem, he’s losing his mind because he lost his true love, and he thinks—or he hopes—that she’s calling to him one night, but the unexpected visitor, it turns out to be a raven. But is the raven real? Or is the man going crazy because he’s so consumed with grief that he’s actually talking to no one at all?” Helen took a deep breath. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Not really.”

“I’m imagining things that aren’t here. Isaac. He’s not real.”

Agnes leaned forward, nodding. “You mean you agree with Wade now? You think he’s a ghost too?”

“No, I mean he’s a figment of my imagination.”

Agnes’s brow furrowed. “But what about your husband? He sees Isaac too.”

“My husband?” Helen shook her head and looked away. “He’s probably not real either. Maybe I live here alone.”

“What? Helen.”

Helen lowered her head. Her eyes felt heavy.

“You don’t live here alone.” Agnes motioned to the hooks by the door. “There’s a man’s hat there. I’ve seen men’s boots and jackets and things. You don’t live alone.”

Helen lifted her head, even more distressed now. “I mean, are you even real?”

“Helen, come on.” Agnes smiled at first, but her smile fell away as Helen continued talking.

“It would make sense, wouldn’t it? Of course I would give myself a friend who’s a young woman, someone with her life ahead of her, someone who could remind me what it was like when I was full of so many possibilities myself.” Helen laughed, but there was no humor in it.

“Okay, you’re scaring me now,” Agnes said quietly.

“No, it’s actually very poetic,” Helen said. “People love to say Edgar Allan Poe was crazy. And some people think Emily Dickinson eventually lost her mind too. All our heroes either got tired or went insane. Did you know that?”

Agnes didn’t answer at first, but as Helen stared at her, waiting patiently, Agnes finally said, “No, I didn’t know that.”

“How could you not know that?”

“I don’t even know who Emily Dickinson is.” Agnes held up the manila envelope. “Listen, Helen—”

“You don’t know who Emily Dickinson is?” Helen sat back in her seat. In a strange way, that too made perfect sense. “Ah, so I created a friend for myself who’s very unlike me so I could educate her in things that I’m interested in. Emily Dickinson was a famous poet of the 1800s.”

Agnes placed the envelope on the table. “I didn’t do great in English class, but I don’t think they covered poetry anyway.”

“There are many things I could tell you about Emily Dickinson, but I think something worth sharing right now is that in her later years, she went into isolation, and supposedly she spoke to visitors through a closed door. She wouldn’t even see them face-to-face.”

“Okay.”

Helen stood up from the table. “I think you should go.”

“Helen, we haven’t even talked yet. Please, just sit,” Agnes pleaded. “Let’s just talk, okay?”

“I like you, Agnes.” Helen smiled at her. What a sweet friend she’d invented. “But I’m done with this.”

“Done with what?”

“This!” Helen opened her arms as if to indicate the whole world.

“I understand. I’m fed up with all kinds of shit too. But can you listen for a minute?”

“No, I can’t,” Helen said firmly. Her patience was fading.

“But you need to see this.” Agnes tapped the manila envelope resting on the table.

“Don’t,” Helen warned her. “I said I’m done.”

“Did something happen?” Wide-eyed, Agnes stared up at Helen. “Why are you suddenly like this? What happened since I was here last?”

“Please leave.”

Agnes stood then, but she didn’t move toward the door. Instead, she took a cautious step toward Helen and reached out as if to touch her arm, but Helen rocked back on her heels and slapped Agnes’s hand away.

“No, I want you to go!”

“If we could just talk—”

“We don’t need to talk. I’m tired of talking. I’m tired of all of this. Go away!”

Helen squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her fingers over them. She stayed like that for several long beats, and when she reopened her eyes, she found Agnes was still standing there, wearing a desperate expression.

Helen stared back at her, unblinking, and then she said, “Get. Out. Of. My. House.”

In a hesitant voice, Agnes said, “Okay, I’m sorry. I’ll put this here for you to look at later.” She indicated the envelope on the table.

“Just go!” Helen shouted as she pressed her hands over her face.

“You really need to look at what’s in the envelope. Helen, did you hear me?”

“I heard you! Now go!”

“Are you sure? I’m worried about you. You’re freaking me out . . .”

“I don’t care! Just leave!” Helen dug her fists into her eyes. “Just go, go, go, go away . . . please.”

With her eyes still squeezed shut, Helen moved her hands to her ears. She didn’t want to see or hear anything more from her phantom friend, so she didn’t know that Agnes started to cry as she backed away toward the front door. Nor did she know that when Agnes reached it, she opened it but made no move to leave.

Agnes tried one more time, spoke loudly enough to be sure she’d be heard. “Helen?”

“Just leave me alone!” Helen shouted.

Agnes stumbled back and exited the house, leaving the door ajar.

“Go!!!!!!!”

As Helen shouted the word, a powerful gust of wind kicked up, the kind of wind that shouldn’t be inside a house, mighty and mystical and magical. The wind slammed the door shut, and it carried the manila envelope off the kitchen table and under the side table. Helen’s eyes were still shut, so she didn’t see the envelope disappear from sight, but she heard the door slam, and it made her flinch.

At last, she uncovered her ears and opened her eyes to find herself alone in the kitchen.

Alone, as she suspected she’d been this entire time.

She collapsed into the kitchen chair, exhausted.

Chapter Forty-Five

Helen took a bath, bandaged the cut on her leg, and put on a clean dress. She went down to the cellar to get her favorite photo of Tyler, and she put it in her dress pocket. She needed to leave the farmhouse and get help. She didn’t know if she could drive out of here in the truck when the men returned, because if they weren’t real, was the truck real? But she’d figure it out one way or another.

She slid a record onto the spindle of the vintage Zenith player and gently set the arm on the outer edge of the record. The violins began to cry. She turned up the volume, so she’d be able to hear the music throughout the house, and then she drifted into the next room to wait.

The men came home late, so much later than usual. Helen was standing in front of the burning fireplace, staring at her book titles in a daze.

As she heard the truck doors shutting outside, she dragged herself into the kitchen and was greeted with a quiet little hiss, like a serpent’s. Was her house turning into the Garden of Eden? She paused and then realized she’d forgotten to take the record from the turntable. The needle must have been spinning in the run-out groove for hours, filling the kitchen with an endless hiss.

She lifted the needle, killing the snake.

Wade and Isaac entered, each carrying a grocery bag of food. Make-believe men bringing her make-believe food.

“Oh, how nice of you two to show up again, and with more food,” Helen snapped. “What a vision you both are.”

Wade gave her a perplexed look as he set his bag on the table. “We had to go into town again.”

Helen turned toward Isaac’s impenetrable gaze. He was like a Renaissance painting, saying everything and nothing all at once. His eyes, inscrutable. She wasn’t going to be able to break him. She turned back to Wade.

“Why’d you go into town?”

“The truck was acting up. We went to get a part, but the carburetor’s shot, so we had to leave it at the shop.”

Helen’s body went rigid. “So the truck isn’t here?”

“I just said I had to leave it.”

“How did you get here then?”

“Tommy Tompkins dropped us off.”

“Bullshit,” Helen said.

“What?”

“Nobody’s named Tommy Tompkins.”

Wade looked at her strangely. “This guy is.”

“I doubt it.”

“Well, I don’t know, Helen. I didn’t see his birth certificate. But why the hell does it matter? We got a few things from the store that I forgot yesterday.”

“That’s funny. You think you need to eat?”

“Huh?”

“Do you have an intestinal tract, Wade?” Helen stepped forward and pressed her hand to his torso. It felt solid, but she wasn’t fooled. “Or is this all air in here?”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with me? All kinds of things, apparently. For one, the fact that you two just waltzed back through my front door uninvited. How long do you plan on coming around?”

Wade slammed his hands down on the table. “I’m tired of you acting crazy like this!”

Helen slammed her hands down on the table even harder and leaned toward Wade. “I can’t help it, Wade. Because I am crazy!”

Isaac softly touched her shoulder. “Helen?”

She reeled around and gave him a patronizing look. “What?”

“Just take a deep breath,” Isaac said.

“That’s rich,” Wade said. “My dead brother telling my crazy wife to calm down.”

Despite it all, Isaac’s touch and the sound of his voice did have a calming effect on her. She stepped away from the table to put distance between herself and both men.

Wade said, “I went all the way into town to get food, and I expect dinner to be ready in a half hour.”

A long moment passed. Then Helen smiled brightly. “Okay, honey.”

While the men cleaned themselves up, Helen slipped outside. Just as Wade had said, the truck wasn’t there. She walked at least fifty yards down the driveway to be sure he hadn’t parked it around the first bend, but it wasn’t there either.

She was in the middle of nowhere with two imaginary men, and the only way to leave was to walk alone miles in the dark. The last time she’d done that, wolves had attacked her.

She would have to plan an escape in the morning.

Helen went back inside.

Three steaming hot plates of white pasta sat on the kitchen counter. The room smelled of fresh garlic and cream and retribution. Helen was ready to put the finishing touch on her cooking.

Alone in the kitchen, she twisted the lid off the glass jar of the powdered antipsychotic medication and dumped it over two plates of pasta. It didn’t make much sense to drug phantom men, but maybe she could defeat them both inside her mind with human defenses, the way you beat monsters asleep in your nightmares with fighting and running and screaming. No matter what, she was leaving tomorrow one way or another, so she may as well use up the rest of the meds. She sprinkled the very last of the powder on the third plate, her own serving. She probably needed it most of all.

Isaac entered in clean clothes, and she vaguely registered that he was in Wade’s dark green plaid flannel shirt, which was her favorite. Isaac’s gaze fastened on hers as he approached, speaking in a soft tone. “I want to see you alone later.”

Helen picked up a plate of pasta and held it out to him. Isaac momentarily hesitated, then he reached for it with the same hands that had pinned her hips down the night before. She turned away, and Isaac brought his plate to the table.

Wade walked in then, his clothes clean too, a brown button-up shirt and khaki pants. For some inexplicable reason, these men had dressed for dinner. What kind of game were they playing now inside her head?

Wade came to her with a look of contrition on his face. “I’m sorry I yelled at you earlier.”

She nodded and handed him a plate.

During the meal, Helen found her eyes floating from Wade to Isaac, pondering how it was that she could have fallen down such a twisted rabbit hole and how she was going to get out of it. Both men were shoveling large bites of pasta in their mouths. She needed to eat too, but she just didn’t feel hungry. She hadn’t even lifted her fork yet.

She wondered what her family understood about her present state. Perhaps they thought that by living here alone with nature she might be able to heal her grief. Perhaps they thought she just needed time to let go of Tyler and return to the land of the living. But if they knew she’d lost her mind, she found it hard to believe they would have just left her out here by herself. Every time she called home, she’d tell her mother about the things Wade was doing. If Wade didn’t exist, wouldn’t that be alarming for her mother to hear? Surely, she wouldn’t just let Helen live here like that, enabling an array of delusions.

A disquieting feeling took hold. Something wasn’t adding up. There was something that she knew but wasn’t seeing. Her eyes drifted to the Edgar Allan Poe book, still sitting on the edge of the table.

Helen watched Wade lift another bite of food to his mouth. There was dirt etched into the contour of his cuticles. If you worked the trees, you could never get all the dirt off no matter how hard you scrubbed your hands.

She looked at Isaac’s hands. His fingernails were clean. Unnaturally so for someone who had been hitchhiking cross-country, then working in the forest multiple days in a row.

She looked at Wade again and noticed the shaving nick on his jawline. He was always cutting himself.

Helen turned back to Isaac, taking in the stubble on his face.

“Your facial hair,” she said. “It’s been the same length the entire time you’ve been here.”

“I like to keep it the same,” Isaac said.

“How? We only have razors here.”

Abruptly, Wade dropped his fork and it clanged on his plate. “I don’t feel so good. I think I need to lie down.”

“You look like you could use a hand, Brother.” Isaac stood and put an arm around Wade to help him from the room.

“Isaac, do you feel okay?” Helen asked.

His plate was almost empty too, but he seemed unaffected by the meds.

“Yeah, fine.”

As Helen watched Isaac give Wade a rare dose of brotherly love, a stunning realization came over her. Isaac wasn’t sick from the meds, and he didn’t have a black eye. Two nights ago, Wade had punched him in the face, and there wasn’t a bruise on him. There’d never been a bruise. How had she not noticed?

The men disappeared around the corner.

Alarmed, she rose from her seat and tipped over her water glass in the process. She snatched it and set it upright, but not before a puddle of water spread across the wood. Her mind had bent in so many directions since Isaac had shown up. First Wade was losing his mind. Then he was lying to her. Then she was losing hers. She’d been so quick to place the blame on Wade, in part because it hadn’t been until Wade had claimed Isaac was a ghost that Helen had started to have her own disturbing visions. Wade’s claims—lies?—had triggered something in her. They had pulled her down to a dark place that scared her, and she’d been desperate to stop it.

Helen tossed her place mat on top of the puddle of water, then went to the kitchen sink with her empty water glass. She filled the glass with water and turned from the sink, surveying the room. The empty kitchen table looked so lonely. And that’s when she suddenly recognized her error in memory. These past several days, she’d been thinking the dark visions had started after Wade had claimed Isaac was dead, but that wasn’t quite right. The first one had happened right there, at the kitchen table. Isaac’s first meal with them. The woman—her, essentially—in the dirtied nightgown. She had seen that before Wade had made any claims about Isaac being dead.

Something inside her shifted as she remembered the events that occurred before Isaac’s arrival. The way she’d screamed at the sky, demanding a response from the universe, quite literally wanting to shoot a hole through it. If she couldn’t have Tyler, she wanted something, and she’d felt the thunder ripple through her soul.

And then Isaac had shown up.

Prior to that, Helen had been sad, deeply so, but she had never questioned the fabric of reality in the days since moving to the farmhouse. She’d left that all behind in the city. It wasn’t until Isaac’s arrival that her mind started to unravel.

Helen’s throat felt dry.

As she brought the water glass to her lips, something caught her eye. Beneath the side table, she saw a manila envelope.

It was the envelope Agnes had brought her! There it was, still in her kitchen.

Today, Helen had been so trapped inside her spiderweb of theories that she hadn’t wanted to listen to Agnes and hadn’t wanted to look at the envelope, the very thing that might hold a concrete answer. Had she really questioned only hours earlier if Agnes was a real person? Of course Agnes was real, and she’d left the envelope for Helen.

She set aside her glass and crossed the room, sensing she was crossing a bridge over this canyon of confusion into a land that might make sense. She knelt and reached beneath the side table, feeling a nervous spark in her chest as her hand closed around the envelope.

Helen brought it to the kitchen table and opened it. Inside were several sheets of paper folded in half.

She took a deep breath and unfolded them, revealing internet articles printed from a computer. She spread them on the table, and as she read the headlines of each one, she felt a terrible sensation move through her:

CAPICHON MAN, ISAAC FARRIS, KILLED IN FARMING ACCIDENT

CORONER YET TO RULE IN FARMER ISAAC FARRIS’S DEATH

WADE FARRIS IS CLEARED BY POLICE AS HIS BROTHER’S DEATH IS RULED AN ACCIDENT

Smiling photographs of Isaac and Wade at different ages accompanied the text.

Helen’s eyes devoured the articles one after another. They all said versions of the same thing: Isaac Farris had died in a farming accident, and Wade Farris had been driving the tractor that had run over his brother. The community was shocked by the tragedy, and the Farris farm was put up for sale after five generations of family ownership. In lieu of sending flowers, Wade Farris was requesting that donations be sent to the Oregon Farmers Emergency Relief Fund.

Isaac Farris’s body was buried in the Capichon Hillside Cemetery.

Chapter Forty-Six

Clutching one of the articles, Helen moved away from the kitchen table as the weight of it settled over her. Ever since Isaac had appeared in her kitchen, the world had felt as though it was shifted on its axis, a mystifying mix of terrifying visions and awakening desires that had been wrapping and unwrapping her slowly. As she’d tried to work out what was happening, she’d had bursts of certainty, but each explanation had always felt feverish and muddled. She’d been reaching for some type of safety and assurance, and Isaac had woven an alluring web of answers. She had walked right into it.

Now she knew the truth and she didn’t feel even a dusting of doubt.

Isaac was dead.

She leaned against the counter for support. This entire time, she’d been looking at and talking to a dead man, letting him touch her. Perhaps she should have been horrified, but she felt only numbness, felt hollowed out by the reality of it.

Then she heard footsteps coming down the hall and sensed the chill that accompanied it. She crumpled the article she was holding and shoved it down the front of her dress.

The other articles were still laid out on the table though.

She rushed to them and quickly refolded the papers as the footsteps got closer. At the last moment, she snatched her Poe book from the table and hid them between its pages.

“Hi,” she said, hoping Isaac didn’t notice how breathless she sounded as he entered.

His expression indicated that he did indeed notice. “Hi.”

The book slipped from her hand and dropped to the table with a thud. She tried to pretend it hadn’t happened, but her eyes skirted to the book. Yes, the articles were still tucked inside. Thank God. She hoped the single crumpled one in the front of her dress wasn’t creating a bulge in the fabric.

“How’s Wade doing?” she asked, as conversationally as she could manage.

“Okay.”

“I should check on him.” Helen hurried past Isaac, head down, not wanting to make eye contact.

As she exited the room, she had the urge to turn back and grab the Poe book, but that would bring more attention to it. It would be okay, she told herself. It’s not like Isaac was going to sit down and read Poe that very minute.

When Helen burst into the bedroom, she found Wade sprawled on top of the bed. “Wade, we need to talk.”

“I need to rest.” He sounded groggy.

“It’s my fault you’re sick. It was the pasta.”

“The pasta was fine.”

Helen reached down the front of her dress and pulled out the crumpled article. She smoothed it out and handed it to Wade. “I’m so sorry I didn’t believe you.”

His eyes roamed the article. He didn’t need to read it though. He’d lived it. With a heavy sigh, he looked up at her. Helen put a hand on his shoulder, the first time they’d touched tenderly in many days, and Wade lowered his head to the pillow. “I don’t feel too good,” he said.

“I’m sorry about that too.”

Wade closed his eyes. He had no idea what she was talking about, and explaining it wouldn’t help anything right now. She contemplated trying to convince him to go into the bathroom and make himself throw up, but the powdered medication had likely already been absorbed into his bloodstream. She certainly hadn’t given him enough to kill him. That, she knew. But she had given him much more than a normal dose, and she needed to let him rest.

Helen exited the bedroom and started down the hall, trying to formulate a plan. As she was passing the guest room, Isaac appeared in the doorway. He leaned against the doorframe.

She tried to smile, but it felt false. “Isaac.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes.”

He studied her with intensity, and she studied him right back. Wade suspected Isaac meant them harm, but she had seen the good in him. If people could be complex and contradictory, couldn’t ghosts be? Tyler would never have answered her pleas by sending a ghost her way, but that didn’t mean she and Wade were in danger. Maybe Isaac’s reasons for being here weren’t bad.

Isaac said, “I think I’ll read a little and then turn in.”

“Okay.”

“Maybe some Poe?”

“Oh, sure . . .” Helen needed to get the articles out of the book. “It’s in the kitchen. Stay here and I’ll get it for you.”

“No need.” Isaac’s hand moved from behind the doorframe, revealing he was holding the book.

Her eyes zeroed in on the edge of one of the printed articles barely poking out from between the pages. “Maybe instead of reading, we could talk,” she said.

Isaac pushed the door open fully and gestured for her to step inside. She could see past him to the mess of dirty sheets from last night’s encounter. The burning candle on his bedside dresser cast a glow on it.

Helen said, “Maybe in the living room.”

“You seem nervous.”

“Not at all.”

He glanced back at the bed. “Do you wish we hadn’t last night?”

Again, she tried to smile, but her expression was like a mask with its paint cracking.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Helen,” Isaac said. “I think the risk was worth the reward, don’t you?”

She nodded, but she was listening to the sound of his voice more than the actual words. There was something unkind in his tone, and she wondered if it had always been there beneath the surface and she’d just ignored it. Or perhaps she had sensed it and been drawn in by it. She had her own carefully concealed rage, all her heartaches stacked pyres high for burning black, but she’d been unable to ever light the match. Maybe it was part of why she had felt such a fast connection to Isaac. She had hoped he was going to help her finally burn down her rage and her regrets, once and for all.

He stared at her for a long time before holding up the Poe book. His eyes looked cold. The only fires Isaac wanted to start were his own.

He tilted his head toward her, almost conspiratorially, and he said, “Or maybe it’s that you’re nervous I’ll find the articles you hid in here?”

Chapter Forty-Seven

Helen felt her breath catch, and Isaac smiled at her, but his smile didn’t reach his eyes. The cruelty that she had previously seen in his face that she thought was reserved for only Wade was there now, and it was for her.

He lowered the Poe book and tapped it against the side of his thigh.

“Are you here to hurt us?” Helen asked.

“Yes and maybe.”

“Yes and maybe?”

“Yes, I plan to kill Wade,” Isaac said in a calm voice that communicated the statement as simple fact. His next words were spoken more softly, almost playfully. “But I don’t know yet what happens to you.”

His eyes flashed in pleasure as he watched Helen try to hold in her reaction, then he shut the guest room door in her face.

“Wade, come on!” Helen shook Wade’s sleeping form.

He stirred on top of the bed, but just barely.

“We need to go.” She tapped him on the cheek and his eyes opened.

“What’s happening?” He sat up, dazed.

Helen went to the closet and grabbed the first pair of his shoes she saw. She brought them to him. “You were right,” she said. “It’s not safe here with Isaac.”

Wade’s eyes widened. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, and she grabbed his right foot and shoved it in the shoe.

“What happened?” he whispered.

“He told me he plans to kill you.”

“Christ,” Wade said. He gave his head a vigorous shake, trying to rouse himself, trying to ready himself for what was coming.

Helen finished tying the laces on his first shoe, then reached for his second shoe.

He asked, “You believe me then?”

She looked up into his eyes. “I believe you.”

Moments later, they were creeping down the hall. A light peeked out from beneath the closed guest room door. Wade, still trying to regain his equilibrium, stumbled a little right in front of it and Helen steadied him. She held her breath, anticipating the door would swing open, but it stayed shut. She could feel Wade’s fear too, in the stiffness of his shoulders, as she guided him into the living room.

Just then the lights in the house began to flicker, dreadful intervals of complete darkness mixed with flashes of brightness. Helen hesitated and turned to Wade. They looked at each other for only a heartbeat, then rushed into the kitchen.

Wade went to the hook by the door where he kept his truck keys and froze as he remembered the truck was in town. He turned back to her with a horrified expression.

She said, “We have to run. Can you run?”

Suddenly, the sound of violins filled the kitchen. It was her record, the one she’d been playing when Isaac had first arrived.

Wade’s face clouded with confusion.

“He knows we’re trying to leave,” Helen said.

Then they both jumped at the sound of a dull thud. Helen spun around and looked into the living room. Her reading chair was lying on its side. There was the thump of something hitting the wall somewhere farther back in the house, followed by the clatter of a wall hanging smashing to the ground in the hallway, and then the lights cut out altogether.

They clambered for the front door. Wade’s hand found the doorknob first, and he flung it open. Isaac was standing there on the other side of it. The lights popped back on, casting the kitchen in a harsh yellow glow.

“Leaving?” Isaac said.

He stepped inside the house, and Helen and Wade backed up into the center of the kitchen.

One of the kitchen chairs behind them tipped over on its own, and the broom crashed to the floor from behind the refrigerator. Helen flinched.

“Can you please stop doing that?” she said, surprised by how calm she sounded. She was just so tired of it all.

Isaac considered her for a moment, and then he said, “Fine.”

The violin music stopped.

“I’m not really here to play with your furniture anyway,” Isaac said to her, and then he looked at Wade. “I came here for him.”

Isaac lifted his hands in the air. Without making any physical contact, the motion sent Wade flying backward, airborne, crashing off the opposite wall as if he’d been blasted from a cannon.

“Isaac, stop!” Helen shouted.

Isaac ignored her as he strode over to Wade’s crumpled body and stared down at him with restrained fury. “How does it feel, Wade? You’re used to being in control of everything, aren’t you?”

Wade tried to sit up, but Isaac pushed him back down with his boot. She could hear the hatred in Isaac’s voice as he continued to berate Wade. His wrath had been wrapped in silence and hidden behind his strange charm, but now it was plain to see.

Helen slipped backward toward the front door. When she reached it, she and Wade made eye contact, and he gave her a small nod: Go, run!

She raced out the door and immediately ran for the hiding spot where the gun was stowed with her garden tools. It was illogical to run for a weapon in a fight against a ghost, but it was the first thing she thought to do. And she had to do something.

But the gun wasn’t there.

That’s when the crashing and shouting ramped up inside the house, and she wondered if she was hearing the sounds of another husband’s murder. For half a second, she felt defeated as her mind screamed, Not again! But then it was as if all of the anger stored in her muscle memory flooded into the blood of her veins.

She turned toward the side yard and sprinted for the ax.

It was there.

She ripped the ax from the stump and ran back toward the front of the house, just as Wade flew out the door, his body carried at least twenty feet through the air. He slammed into the shed and collapsed to the ground, groaning.

Isaac stepped outside.

Helen raised the ax in the air above her head.

Isaac looked at her almost tenderly. “Oh, Helen.”

Chapter Forty-Eight

Helen knew it was pointless. She couldn’t fight the darkness with a steel blade. She lowered the ax to waist level but kept her grip on it firm.

“Isaac, please,” she pleaded.

“Please what? Please touch you? Please hurt him? Please don’t? Please do?” Isaac’s tone was crueler than she’d ever heard it, and yet it spoke to the hollow place deep inside her.

For a long time, they just stared at each other.

Finally, Helen asked, “Why are you haunting us?”

Isaac cocked his head, as if surprised that she didn’t know. “Because you asked me to.”

Her shoulders slumped and her grip on the ax loosened until it slid from her grasp and landed softly in the grass next to her.

He was right, and she was tired of pretending that Isaac had been entirely uninvited, that she’d been the lady in the carriage and he’d been the highwayman. She was a raider of the night too. In her grief, she’d kicked down doors that should have stayed closed.

Isaac smiled. “I made you something.”

“What?”

He walked to her and put his arm around her. “I’ll show you.”

The worst part was that she wondered what it was. She wanted to see.

As he guided her across the yard toward the garden, he gently placed a lit candlestick in her hand. He hadn’t been holding it a moment earlier, but there it was now.

“You can do anything, can’t you?” she said, staring at the candle.

“Maybe not anything.” His hand, featherlight on her shoulder, squeezed. “Or maybe I can. Does that excite you?”

She realized mutely that all of the visions she’d been having—they were Isaac’s creations.

As they got closer to their destination, Helen knew where he was taking her.

The grave.

She held up the burning candle as they both peered down into the hole. It was the perfect size to hold her body forever. It would be a premature burial.

“I can help you go there,” Isaac said.

Helen shook her head, but it wasn’t very convincing.

“This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” She could hear a trace of amusement in his voice.

“No.”

“No?”

“I don’t know.”

Isaac showed Helen his hand. The revolver rested in it.

“It’s my brother’s fault I left this world prematurely,” he said.

“It was an accident,” she said weakly.

“Doesn’t matter. He was mad and he was reckless. That makes it his fault,” Isaac said, and Helen couldn’t help but feel the slightest pang of sympathy for him. “I wasn’t ready to go. But you, you can choose.”

She felt a trembling in her core. Fear first. But temptation second, and the second wave crashed in stronger than the first. Delicately, she took the gun from him and stared down at it. It felt warm and inviting in her hand, like a piece of poetry. That wasn’t how a gun was supposed to feel.

She looked up at Isaac, just in time to see the shock of impact—crack!—as Wade slammed a shovel into his back.

Isaac stumbled forward to the edge of the grave, but it was as if a force field prevented him from falling in.

Wade swung again at Isaac, but the shovel made contact only with the force field and created a rush of energy that knocked the candle and the gun from Helen’s hands, sending them several feet away into the garden. The flame lit a vegetable bush on fire with an unnatural intensity that swiftly spread to other plants.

Isaac turned to Wade with a look of disgust. And suddenly, all around them, the land was filled with a thunderous roar. Helen recoiled and covered her ears. Isaac was simply staring down at Wade as he cowered in the dirt, but she knew Isaac had to be the one creating the sound. It was worse than any physical pain she’d ever felt. The powerful noise went on and on as the flames spread through the garden.

She spotted the gun lying at the garden’s edge. She grabbed it and jumped into the grave. The fall was farther than she anticipated, close to five feet down, and when her feet hit the soft dirt at the bottom, she fell forward onto her knees.

It was much quieter down there, peaceful almost. The sounds above were abnormally muted, as if the grave was her own safe and private chamber. The Edgar Allan Poe book was down there, and it lay open to “The Raven.” Next to it lay the dead raven that she’d tried to bury.

She sat down beside the book and contemplated the gun. It was time to finally go through with it. She had grown far too weary for this world.

“Helen?” The voice that said her name was heavenly.

She knew it was him before she even lifted her head and took in the sight. Tyler was sitting in the grave across from her.

This time, Helen knew Tyler wasn’t one of Isaac’s wicked distortions. She could feel it in the fabric of her soul. She’d never been more certain of anything. Tyler had finally answered her pleas.

Helen burst into tears.

Chapter Forty-Nine

Tyler smiled softly at her, and it was the most soothing feeling she’d ever felt in her entire life. He was a beautiful apparition, yet somehow still whole, exactly as he’d looked the last night she’d seen him, but there was no blood or injuries anywhere on him. His presence touched every part of her body, her heart, her mind, her soul. She could feel his goodness moving through her and all around her. It was the first time she’d felt safe since he’d died.

Helen set the gun in the dirt next to her and released a long-held breath. Two years of waiting were finally over. “Tyler, I’ve been trying to talk to you for so long.”

When he spoke, his words were made of love. “I hear you.”

She wiped at her wet cheeks and felt the longing in her chest swell. “But you never answer.”

“I answer you, but not with words.”

As Helen stared into Tyler’s eyes, the present fell away. She was truly herself again. Gone was the woman who had married a man she barely knew and maybe didn’t even like all that much. Gone was the woman who had slept with an entirely different man just to fill the emptiness. Gone were the rage and the regrets. Helen wasn’t perfect. She’d never been perfect. But she’d once been a good woman with a good man who’d stood behind her and believed in her. She’d been happy most of the time, and she’d been willing to fight the good fights and willing to try when the chips were down.

For a moment, she was that woman again.

“Tyler,” she said, “that night, there was something you wanted to tell me. What was it?”

He smiled softly again. “You already know, Helen.”

She nodded slowly. Believing there’d been a lost message from him was just one of the many ways she’d beaten herself up over the last two years.

“I love you,” Helen said, realizing she’d always had the answer.

Tyler nodded. Indeed, those were the words. It was that simple. All he’d wanted to say to her that night was the exact thing she already knew, the same sentiment she’d heard a million times.

“I love you,” he said.

His words reached the darkest corners of her heart and filled them up with light again. Here she was, finally, sitting across from the man who had loved the pilgrim soul in her, and the relief was all-encompassing. And then an even more magical thing happened: Tyler began to tell Helen things without even saying the words aloud. As she absorbed it all, the tears trickled down her cheeks. He told her that throughout her lifetime, so many others could and would love the pilgrim soul in her. All endings were also beginnings, and she would reinvent herself as many times as she wanted. Old versions of herself would rest in peace.

Why did it have to happen though? Helen’s soul, not her lips, asked the question, and as his eyes melted into hers, she understood then that it wasn’t that simple. Tyler’s life had been full of so many beautiful moments, so many of them with her, and that night had been one bad moment. That was all. Everyone’s life was made up of good and bad moments. His just happened to end on one particularly terrible one, but that didn’t make it more important than everything that came before it. She was spending too much time reliving the wrong moment. There were better things to remember.

Tyler finally spoke aloud again. “You can let go at any time.”

His body began to flicker, fading in and out of this world and the next.

“But I need you here,” she said.

He smiled, this time sadly. That wasn’t how it worked.

“But you could come see me,” Helen pressed. “Visit me. Like this.”

He looked at her with such tenderness and affection. “I shouldn’t even be here now, darling. You aren’t meant to be staring out windows or standing on riverbanks, waiting like this. We don’t haunt the ones we love.”

“We need to be together,” Helen said. But even as she said the words, even as they came out like a plea, she understood something on a deeper level. Somehow there were things Tyler was still communicating to her that he wasn’t able to say with words. Because all of a sudden, she understood that all those times she’d wondered if she was hearing him in the whispers on the wind and feeling him in the leaves on the breeze, he truly had been there. He was inside her and all around her, and her connection to him would continue to evolve throughout her lifetime.

“We’ll be together someday. But not today,” Tyler said. “It’s time for you to be brave.”

She nodded, because she now also understood that someday she would reconnect with him in some other time and in some other space that was too extraordinary for her to comprehend while she was with the living.

As that knowledge flowed into her, it filled her with peace she didn’t know was possible.

In the next moment, Tyler was gone.

Chapter Fifty

Alone in the grave, Helen began to hear the destruction from above again. It was Wade’s shouts of pain and the sounds of breaking boards.

He needed help.

Helen wasn’t ready to leave the slipstream of her past though. She covered her face with her hands, and the memories of Tyler came flooding back to her along with the understanding that while she now knew that he was somewhere safe and pure and sweet, she was still here in this broken existence without him. And how many years would she have to go on without him? Forty, fifty, sixty? A sobering length of time.

She screamed, so loud it was almost inhuman. It wasn’t a scream of pain or anger exactly. It was a scream of everything that had been bottled up inside of her for two long years. It finally all released, and the animals and the land absorbed her cry so she wouldn’t have to carry it all by herself anymore. Many miles away, owls on branches turned their heads in commiseration. Coyotes tilted their heads back and screeched along with her. Leaves broke free and fluttered to the forest floor, and ripples formed in the pond.

When Helen’s scream finally stopped, everything around her was silent.

Her body felt firmly rooted to this time and place. She inhaled the musky smell of the freshly dug dirt, and that connection to the earth flooded her with the fortitude she needed to face this. She straightened her spine. She could be brave. It was time to call off the dark.

She grabbed the Edgar Allan Poe book and tossed it out of the grave. Next, she tossed the dead raven out, then picked up the gun and hesitated briefly. The grave was so deep that climbing out would be a challenge. She set the gun on the grass above and placed her palms on either side, dug the front of one shoe into the yielding dirt wall for leverage as she lifted her opposite leg, and then hoisted as hard as she could. She rolled onto the grass and felt the heat of the nearby fire immediately.

Grabbing the gun, she sat up on her knees. There was destruction all around. Wood panels torn from the side of the house; the wheelbarrow, buckets, and trash scattered about.

The entire garden was burning, and Wade lay unmoving on the grass. She didn’t think he was dead though. She’d seen death before and it felt different.

Isaac faced Helen and asked, “What will it be?” He’d ripped their entire property to pieces and beat her husband unconscious, yet Isaac didn’t have a mark on him. He looked the same as always, ready to sit down to dinner with her.

Only minutes earlier, she’d tentatively confronted Isaac with a trembling in her core, but now the fear was gone. From Tyler, she’d drawn the strength she needed. When her body had crawled out of the grave, an important part of her soul had crawled back from the dead too. All that buried courage and hope. It was still there, deep inside her. It had never really abandoned her after all; she just hadn’t been able to feel it for so long, but now she could. She knew what she needed to do.

Helen stood up, holding the gun at her side. “I want to thank you, Isaac.”

“Thank me?” He smiled in faint amusement. “Go on then. Thank me.”

“You showed such curiosity in my thoughts and feelings. I don’t know if that was real or if you were just enjoying messing with your brother’s wife, but it doesn’t matter. Because it made me feel a certain way, and it woke me up. So thank you.” She inhaled fortitude and stood up straighter. “But now I want you to leave.” The heat of the fire prickled on her face.

“Leave? But we were just getting used to each other’s darkness.” His eyes looked sad, and she believed the reaction was genuine.

For a moment, Helen considered the man Isaac might have been if his father hadn’t beaten him, if his mother hadn’t died when he was a little boy, and if he’d learned to be friends with his brother instead of rivals. Or if he’d simply done what so many other people in this world managed to do: endure life’s worst challenges instead of letting the devil on their shoulder win.

She pointed the gun at him. She thought of the masked man, who she now knew she was never going to kill. She was going to find a way to move past that too.

So instead, she fired at Isaac, emptying every bullet in the gun.

The bullets went straight through him, causing no damage. He stood his ground and stared calmly at her until she was done.

Isaac said, “You knew that wouldn’t work.”

Helen shrugged. “I know. But I wanted to feel it just the same.” She tossed the gun aside.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“I told you. Leave.”

“Why don’t I believe you?”

Helen picked up the Poe book and flung it into the burning garden. When it hit the flames, it fed the fire. She threw the dead raven in next and felt the heat magnify.

Isaac’s eyes followed her actions, watching the flames spread violently. He looked at Helen, and for the first time, he seemed uncertain.

She crossed the yard to him, and he took a step back as she reached him. That step backward bolstered her feeling of dominion. She gripped the front of his shirt, and his face went dark with the realization that he wasn’t in control any longer.

“You really want me to go,” he said.

“I want you to go,” she repeated.

Still gripping Isaac’s shirt, Helen turned toward the fire and started forward, forcing him back with each step.

Just as Tyler had moments earlier, Isaac began to flicker. His body no longer appeared as a solid man, but unlike the beauty of an apparition that Tyler had been, all Helen saw was a ghost that needed to go. She wasn’t going to let him use her pain any longer to slip into their world to carry out his dark plans.

“But I wasn’t done,” Isaac said.

“You aren’t supposed to be here.”

They were on the fiery edge of the garden now. Helen briefly wondered what it would feel like to burn alive herself, but the thought was so ephemeral that later she wouldn’t even remember that it had flashed in her mind.

“Come with me then,” Isaac said, and there was a part of his words that still sounded enticing. But it was only a very small part now, so small that if anyone had been able to ask her if she still felt that way, she would have said no and it wouldn’t have been an intentional lie.

“Goodbye, Isaac,” Helen said, and she pushed him backward into the flames.

Isaac’s expression was one of disappointment and anger as she released him, until the very last moment, when he smiled at her. That smile wormed its way into the darker parts of her soul as she watched him fall. Just before the flames could engulf him, he disappeared altogether. Gone like dust.

And then the fire abruptly extinguished, leaving behind charred, blackened crops.

Suddenly, Wade sat up, awakening with a dazed groan. “Is he gone?”

Helen went to him and knelt beside him. “Yes. He’s not coming back.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do.”

“What?”

“Trust me,” she said. “Everything’s okay.”

Though Wade had never put much stock into the things Helen said, his shoulders relaxed as if he accepted the words as true. He lowered his head and took several deep, labored breaths as she ran a comforting hand across his back. They sat that way for a long time.

Finally, Wade looked up and said, “Isaac really is gone.” It was a statement, but she heard the question lurking beneath it.

“Isaac really is gone,” she repeated firmly. “He disappeared with the fire. It’s over.”

Wade studied her with a circumspect expression, as if he’d always known there was an underground world inside her. But still, he didn’t ask. Instead, he nodded, his relief palpable as he accepted her simple explanation.

Then he rubbed his face and glanced around, taking in the mess. “Your garden.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Don’t worry. We’ll replant it.”

As she stared at the smoldering remains, Helen realized she’d gotten her wish to burn all the damn Brussels sprouts. “No, Wade,” she said. “We won’t.” Then she wrapped her arms around his neck. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” Wade said. “I love you.”

They sat with their arms around each other for several long moments until Helen asked, “But do you like me?”

“What?”

She let go of him and sat back so she could see his face. “Do you like me?”

“I just said I loved you, didn’t I?”

“I know. And I believe you do, in your own way. But do you like me?”

Wade scoffed. “What’s the difference, Helen? Isn’t loving your wife more important than liking her?”

“In some ways, yes. In other ways, no.”

“Stop with the riddles.”

“Oh, Wade.” Helen sighed. “You don’t even like the way I talk.”

“What? You’re picking a fight now? After everything?” Wade gestured helplessly at the mess around them.

“No, that’s the thing. I’m not picking a fight. I’m just pointing out how different we are. We’ve been through a lot together. I don’t think any of this has been easy on either of us. But we’ve also led very separate, lonely lives out here. We don’t know each other that well, not really. And we don’t like each other nearly as much as we should.”

“That’s a ridiculous thing to say.”

“Do you though?” Helen pressed. “Do you like me?”

After a long beat, Wade turned to her and said, “Lots of husbands don’t like their wives all that much.”

“But Wade,” she said. “They should.”

Chapter Fifty-One

In the bedroom, Helen stripped off her dirt-caked dress and left it in a heap on the floor. Wade could throw it away if he wanted, but she was never going to hand-wash an article of clothing in the cold water of a wooden basin again. She put on a pair of his work pants and used one of her fabric dress belts to cinch them at the waist, then pulled on one of his undershirts.

Outside, she and Wade had talked about a separation. Neither of them had said the word divorce, but Helen felt certain they both knew it was going to come to that. That meant Wade would either live out here alone, or he’d eventually sell this place and move on to something else. The thought made her feel sad for him, but she couldn’t stay with him out of duty.

Helen understood now that she’d chosen Wade in part because she’d recognized that he didn’t want to truly know her. She’d lied to herself that she was coming out here to escape her grief, but in the end, she’d fully shrouded herself in that grief. She’d disappeared further inside herself, all the while playing house with a man who couldn’t tell the difference. Isaac had come along and pierced through that grief. It had been reckless and it had been wrong, but God, it had been exciting. Even if it had made her fall further into the despair and the madness, it had also created a glimmer in the dark: hope. Because now here she stood. Now ready for a different kind of fall. Maybe this time she wouldn’t fall apart but instead finally start to fall back together.

Helen heard a floorboard creak in the hallway, and then Wade appeared in the open doorway with a serious expression. She tried to give him a smile, but there was so much heaviness between them.

“If you buy produce from the market,” she said, “you can store it in the cellar easily for a few months.”

“I know.”

“The thermometer’s on the shelf next to the canning supplies.”

“I know.”

“You should be good on spices for a while. Except cumin. That’s low.”

“Helen,” Wade said quietly. “I can handle it.”

She nodded. Of course he could. She couldn’t think of what to say next, so she turned her attention to her baggy clothes and busied herself with tying the bottom of the undershirt into a knot.

“It’s not your fault,” Wade said. “It’s partly mine too.”

Surprised, Helen looked up. They gazed at each other for a long moment until, finally, she said, “Thank you.”

“I didn’t kill him on purpose, you know.”

Her face softened. “Oh, Wade. I know that.”

“I’m to blame though. I wasn’t being careful like I should. If you care about someone, don’t you make sure they clear the blades before you restart the tractor?”

In this case, with these two brothers, the answer to that question was possibly yes. If Wade and Isaac had loved each other like brothers should, the tractor accident may have never happened. But Helen knew what it was like to be haunted by guilt and grief, so she said, “No one is to blame. Everyone makes mistakes. We all have to learn how to live with mistakes and regrets.”

Wade nodded wearily. “That’s the hard part, figuring out how.”

She echoed, “That’s the hard part.”

After a beat, he turned and left the bedroom, and she knew it was finally time for her to leave too.

Helen’s plan was to walk down the driveway and hitch a ride into town so she could call her mother. It had been so long since she’d hugged her. For the first time since Helen had run away to the woods, her need to connect with her family was stronger than any apprehension she had about returning to Seattle.

She retrieved a small canvas bag from the closet and filled it with things she’d need while waiting for her parents to pick her up: a jar of water, some snacks, cash, a hat, and an extra layer of clothing. In town, she would mail Agnes a letter from the post office explaining she was okay and that she’d visit as soon as she could. The poor girl had to be so worried. Helen added a pen, paper, and envelope to the bag. That was all she needed except for her photo of Tyler.

She knelt to the floor and dug into the pockets of the discarded dress. She found the photo, bent at the corner, but otherwise intact. She tucked it into the inner zipper pocket of the bag.

And then she thought of one last thing.

From the bottom dresser drawer, she retrieved the small stack of letters and cards she’d received in the mail from Tyler’s family. She opened a birthday card from Tyler’s sister, Gracie, and saw the familiar curve of the woman’s G in her signature, the hand-drawn hearts and smiley faces, the love and miss you so much, Helen! inscription.

Next, she unfolded a piece of white linen paper and scanned a handwritten letter in perfect cursive from Tyler’s stepmother, Evelyn:

Wherever you are and whatever you do in life, just know that I will always be rooting for you with my entire heart.

Helen lowered her head and sat in silence. She’d been so wrong to assume that her loved ones had reached out to her over these past eighteen months because they’d felt pity. In her own misery, she’d seen only what she’d felt, not what was really there. It was never just a familial sense of duty; it was always love. She tucked the entire stack of letters and cards into her canvas bag. When she got back to Seattle, she would call Gracie and Evelyn.

In the living room, Helen considered taking some of her books from the mantel, but they would be too heavy to carry all the way to the road. Besides, it felt right to leave them behind.

Even though her Edgar Allan Poe book had burned in the fire, there it was now, back on the mantel, undamaged. She took in all the book titles one last time, remembering how the words inside had once been threads she’d used to try to mend the tattered holes in her head and heart. Those words belonged here. She was ready to find new words and new ideas to occupy her mind.

As Helen ran her fingers across the block letters of Edgar Allan Poe’s name one last time, she reminded herself that he had not been all darkness. Poe had once written love poems to his paramour: We loved with a love that was more than love.

As Helen rounded the corner of the dirt driveway, the sun began to peek over the horizon. The canvas bag was in one hand, and her Zenith record player in its portable suitcase was in the other. At the last moment, she’d grabbed it and tucked the four records inside of it.

Her thoughts went to Tyler. She knew she wouldn’t see him again in this lifetime. When he’d disappeared before her eyes, she’d felt the finality of it. It was strange, the things he’d been able to share with her there in the grave without saying them aloud. It was as if he’d passed to her wisdom that went soul-deep, even as her mind couldn’t quite comprehend the details of it. But she knew with certainty that his visit wouldn’t be repeated. He’d come to her only in her darkest hour, but he loved her too much to haunt her. She wouldn’t need to look for direct signs and messages from him anymore, but she could trust that his goodness remained. And for the first time, she realized she no longer heard his name repeating relentlessly inside her head.

Still, the loneliness was lodged deep inside her. Even all her newfound knowledge couldn’t take away the sorrow of wishing Tyler could still be her husband and still be her best friend. Most women would never stand in an elevator with a man who had rain on his face and recognize their whole world was about to change. Most women would never get that chance, but she’d lived it. So she was always going to miss him.

It was a cool, misty morning, and as she inhaled the clean forest scent, Helen realized a part of her would also miss living alongside the wild animals and the mossy trees. Maybe if she’d come here to start a life with Tyler, instead of Wade, it would have felt like a shared adventure instead of the lonely hideaway it turned out to be. There was magic to find in a place like this.

A movement in the sky caught her eye. Twenty yards away, a raven landed on a tree branch, and it turned its head to stare at her. Helen stopped in the driveway to stare back at it.

After a moment, the raven took flight.

As the beat-up Dodge Dart hit a pothole in the gravel driveway, Agnes almost spilled coffee from her travel thermos onto her sweatshirt. Her dad was sending her on an errand to Seattle to deliver some paperwork on a piece of land he was selling to some city folks. He’d never trusted using the postal service for important things, because he didn’t trust anything that was “run by the damn government.”

Pulling out of her driveway, Agnes accelerated onto the highway. If she got back fast enough from the city, she could stop by Helen’s house on her return trip while Helen’s husband was away working.

Agnes regretted leaving the day before. Helen had been upset, screaming at her to go away, but regardless, Agnes never should have.

In high school, Agnes hadn’t made friends easily. She’d had two friends, to be exact, and one of them had moved to California after graduation and the other was in prison for selling weed illegally. Sometimes Agnes didn’t know what to do or what to say in difficult situations. She didn’t have a lot of practice around people.

She believed Helen was in danger though. Agnes had read those articles about the farm accident, which meant the visitor at Helen’s house was a dead man. On one hand, the idea sounded crazy, but Agnes had lived her life in the middle of nowhere among superstition and bad omens and religious conviction. Her neighbor claimed a possessed black cat tried to rip his throat out. A kid down the road saw demons in the barn. Pretty much everyone said the old Victorian-style house that burned down in third grade happened because a local witch put a spell on it. In some ways, she had been waiting twenty years to see proof of the underworld.

Or maybe it was nothing of the sort. Maybe Helen’s visitor was a real, live man just pretending to be a dead man.

Neither option was good though. Whatever was happening at the house, it was unsafe and it was scaring Helen to the point that she wasn’t even acting like herself.

Agnes was scared too, but she needed to go back. She needed to talk Helen into leaving. Otherwise, she was no friend at all.

Maybe a real friend wouldn’t even wait until this afternoon. Maybe a real friend would go there right now. It was early, so Helen’s husband might still be at the house with the brother in question, but Agnes could drive far enough down the driveway to see if she spotted his truck. She could idle in the trees and back out if she saw any signs the men were there.

Yes, that’s what she’d do. She had to try.

Agnes slowed and turned onto a road that would take her by the entrance to Helen’s property. Her heart was already beginning to beat faster. She told herself to stay calm.

Up ahead on the road, she saw a shape on the shoulder. She let off the gas, and as she got closer, she realized it was a person.

The woman lifted her thumb in the air.

A hitchhiker.

Agnes braked and her mouth parted in surprise.

Her eyes went shiny as she saw the woman’s face.

Chapter Fifty-Two

The old Dodge Dart rolled to a stop on the road. Through the dirty glass of the passenger window, Helen saw Agnes staring at her, wide-eyed.

Helen laughed.

Agnes leaned across the seat and unlocked the passenger-side door’s manual lock. Nothing in the old Dart was automatic other than the music player Agnes had installed herself.

Helen climbed inside and all the two women could manage at first were greetings of hello, said with mutual surprise and relief and fondness in their voices.

In the rearview mirror, Agnes saw a truck coming up behind her, so she put it back into drive and asked, “Why are you hitchhiking?”

“To get into town to use a phone. I’m going back to Seattle.”

“Oh my God!” Agnes said. “That’s where I’m going today!”

“I guess I’m going with you then.” Helen put her bag and record player in the back seat.

“Thank God,” Agnes said, and they both started to laugh again.

“I read the articles,” Helen said. “Thank you.”

“I was just coming by to check on you. I’m sorry—”

“No, I’m sorry I yelled at you—”

“No!”

“I mean it!”

“It’s fine!”

They were talking over the top of each other when Agnes said, “But what happened?!”

Helen wanted to tell Agnes that, in some ways, what happened was that Agnes had always been a sliver of light reaching into Helen’s darkest places. It wasn’t just the articles. It was all the times Agnes had shown up again and again. But Helen didn’t have the strength to explain all of that today. But once she was back in the city and beginning to feel more like herself, she would drive out and visit her friend. She would tell Agnes everything she had been through, and she would thank her properly.

But today, all Helen said was “Wade’s brother left. And I’m leaving too.”

Agnes was glad to hear it, but she also felt a wave of sadness. That meant Helen wouldn’t be on the other side of a hike any longer. “Are you okay?”

“Not entirely,” Helen said. “But I will be someday.” She reached over and squeezed Agnes’s hand. “I’ll come visit you once I get things figured out. I promise.”

That made Agnes feel a little better. She could sense Helen didn’t want to talk about things in detail right now, and even if she did, Agnes wouldn’t have known exactly what to ask.

So instead, she said, “How about some music?” as she turned the volume up on the stereo.

Helen said, “Music sounds good.”

So the women drove with the country music playing, and after a few songs, Helen asked if they were listening to the same musician Agnes had shared with her a couple of days ago.

“Yeah,” Agnes said. “He’s on tour in a couple months too. He has a stop in Seattle.”

Helen tried to picture herself crowding by the concert stage with Tyler, leaning her body into his. Since his death, she hadn’t wanted to do any of the things she used to love because she knew it wouldn’t be the same. But then, nothing was the same anymore.

“I’ll go with you.”

Agnes looked over, a grin spreading on her face. “For real?”

Going to a concert with Agnes would be a different version of something Helen used to love. But she’d never know if she could learn to love it again unless she tried it.

“For real.”

Agnes squeezed the steering wheel in excitement. “I’ll get the tickets tonight!”

Helen smiled, and for the next hour, she watched the trees and the trailers and the No Trespassing signs fly by.

Eventually they rolled into a twenty-five-mile-per-hour speed zone and stopped at a single blinking light to let a semi-truck loaded with cut timber back out of a driveway. That’s when Helen saw the coil of smoke rising into the sky. Kitty-corner, a man with a ruddy face and a fleece coat was tending to a burn pile in his front yard.

The flames were so bright.

The man was tossing things into the fire and watching them curl up and disappear into the orange and the black.

The burn pile was so large it made Helen think of her own garden. She remembered Isaac’s little smile just before she shoved him toward the flames. It had been a curious thing, that smile he’d given her. During the last week, it had been a relief not to have to hide her darkness from him, and she exhaled slowly at the thought. She replayed their final encounter in her mind: how even as she’d been ordering him to leave, he’d still been trying to convince her to join him. She could picture the disappointment on his face when it became clear she wouldn’t. She wondered where he was this very instant. Was he forever burning? Was he still lingering on the outskirts of the living? She realized she might not ever have those answers; it was probably another thing she would learn to live with.

Suddenly, the country music stopped, and everything fell silent. Or so it seemed at first, but when Helen looked over at Agnes, she could see the other woman’s mouth was still moving to the song’s words.

And that’s when Helen sensed his presence. It teased down her spine.

He was back.

As the awareness took hold, Helen slowly spun in her seat to face him.

Her impression of Isaac sitting in the back behind the driver’s seat was so faint, Helen could see through him. They held eye contact for a moment, and then she glared at him. His body grew fainter in response, now barely there.

She turned to face the front. “Agnes, do you see anything?”

“What?”

Helen nodded toward the back seat, and Agnes glanced back. Worry knitted her brow.

“No,” Agnes said. “Should I?”

“No, you shouldn’t.” Helen smiled softly. “Not unless I say so.”

Agnes looked over at Helen, confused, but then the vehicle behind them honked. Agnes had no choice but to pull forward and continue down the highway.

Helen drew in a quiet breath. Someday she would die and be with Tyler again, but someday wasn’t today or tomorrow or the next day. She was still going to have to figure out how to carry the pain of missing him. During the last week, there had been moments when Isaac’s destruction had felt like what she needed.

The road began to wind in a series of sharp turns. Agnes had to keep her eyes glued to the pavement, so she didn’t see Isaac appear again, now visible because Helen had reached an open palm into the back seat, searching, asking, inviting.

Isaac’s hand, solid now, came forward to clasp Helen’s. Their fingers twisted and intertwined. A dark shiver ran through Helen’s body, and she kind of liked it.

Yet she had already chosen to start a brand-new story for herself that wasn’t cloaked in shadows. She had already decided the city would be full of so many new things, so many unknown possibilities. She would be able to begin on page one and see where it led her this time. That was one of the beautiful things about starting over.

Helen squeezed Isaac’s hand hard enough that, for a moment, her fingernails dug into him.

And then she let go.

Acknowledgments

Thank you, Stefanie Lieberman, my dream agent of dream agents (quite literally the top entry on my “dream agents to query” spreadsheet)! The day we signed was one of the biggest milestones of my life, and it was just the beginning of good things to come. I deeply admire your rare combination of a strategic business mind and true creative vision. I will always be grateful that you grabbed my pages off the slush pile and launched my author rocket ship into this publishing universe with confidence and care. Molly Steinblatt, your thoughtful insight and behind-the-scenes but indispensable support have been invaluable. Alysse Rodriguez, I appreciate your meticulous attention to detail and poised reliability at every stage. I’m so lucky to have such a great team in my corner, and I owe a debt of gratitude to everyone at Janklow & Nesbit who’s had a hand in this journey. Additionally, thank you to Will Watkins at CAA and Olivia Blaustein, who together believed in the promise of my book, and to Will, for your continued direction as we shape pathways toward the silver screen.

My profound thanks to my editor, Liz Stein. From the moment we first met, I felt your genuine excitement for my story and the passion with which you championed it. During the editorial phase, your thoughtful guidance and keen ability to balance character, plot, and emotion truly helped the story grow into something even more vivid and heartfelt. I am so grateful for our collaboration! I’m also grateful to Tess Day, Jen McGuire, and Brittani Hilles for their enthusiasm and support in helping bring this book into the world. Thanks to the entire team at William Morrow and HarperCollins who believed in this story and believed in me. Having the backing of such an incredible imprint and publisher has made navigating this process a true pleasure.

Dear reader, I want to thank you for making it to the end of my book. All my life, I’ve wanted to tell stories that make people feel something. So let’s jump back in time to Winlock, Washington (population 1,000), to my family farm, where coyote howls echoed through the fir trees at night. I was a little girl living there with a dream of becoming a storyteller. It was worlds away from the glittering lights of New York City and Hollywood, and I didn’t know anyone who had even tried to be an author, a filmmaker, or an actress. Our tiny high school didn’t have a stage for the theater department plays, but what our town lacked in resources, it made up for with big open skies, homegrown loyalty, and enduring friendships. To anyone in our community who encouraged my creativity in those early years, I say thank you.

There were a handful of teachers who especially nurtured the writer in me: my third grade teacher and devoted pen pal, Karen Moses; my fifth grade teacher, David Moses, who let me launch a class newspaper among other often-silly artistic projects; my sixth grade teacher, the late Jim Buchanan, who convinced the county newspaper that I was ready to write my own weekly column; and my high school yearbook adviser, Sharon Lyons, who granted us creative freedom, yet never let the punctuation slip.

I am full of gratitude for those who have lifted me up during this long journey: to Aunt Beckie, for a lifetime of unwavering enthusiasm and belief in me; to Paul Barbarus, for always being there with wisdom and understanding of the creative life; to Robbi Stedman, for a shared childhood of deliciously scary stories, powerful imagination, and curiosity; to the late Joe Ungari, the uncle and artist who made magical things feel possible; to Sean Gleaves, for years of film projects together, trusty writing feedback, and loyalty; to Parsa, for your endless gift of humor and steady reassurance; and to Dan, Linda, and Kyle Godat, for friendship that counted as family—and of course, to Colin. Losing you deepened my understanding of grief and what it means to carry someone forward in my heart, always.

Big thanks to my “girls” (Nicole Bryant, Lauren Ford, Trish Jones, Michelle Sharp, Sarah Whitehead). You are all some of my loudest and proudest cheerleaders, and our talks about life, goals, and dreams helped me find my way here. Sending an extra dose of gratitude to Nicole and Trish for dropping everything to read my novel on short notice as I prepared to send it out to agents.

I am so appreciative of my other early readers (and loved ones)! Amanda Carroll, your excitement for my story and Helen’s character reassured me that I was on the right track; Traca Fragomene, your thoughtful and careful feedback was invaluable; and Mandi Mollerstuen Toves, your friendship and steadfast encouragement have, time and again, been something I can count on.

Thank you, Jocelyn Ungar, for being the “coolest” big cousin ever and filling my youthful head with ghost stories and wild ideas. The spirit of our long-ago story swapping is imprinted on these pages, and I’m grateful to have you as an indispensable early reader.

I am so lucky to have the Colleys as my family: Mike, Dorothy, Ron, Zan, Rob, Jenn, Kim, Ryan, Frankie, Danny, Whitney, Sophie, Avery, Drew, Aubree, the late and great Don, and the whole crew! All of you have always given boundless love and support and celebrated the smallest victories while holding on to belief that even bigger ones were around the corner.

My sister, Lindsey: Over the years, every time you finished reading one of my screenplays, you told me my writing would be the thing to change my life someday. When I turned my attention to writing my first book, you imagined the possibilities right alongside me; no dream was ever too big. Your faith in me through all my creative endeavors has been the most powerful kind of encouragement. Thank you for a sisterhood filled with conversations about books, movies, television, and music. And Shelby, an artistic rising tide, I can’t wait to see where your own art and stories take you!

Mom and Dad, you moved away from the city and put down roots in a small town so I could grow up roaming the woods, playing sports in rural parks, and breathing fresh air every day. As an adult, I realize more than ever how special that childhood was: It gave me wide-open spaces and a freedom that nurtured my imagination. Thank you for making that move, and for your unconditional love and ongoing support—all things that have shaped who I am and the work I want to bring into the world. Thank you, too, for always reading my stories and for letting our home become a semi-permanent film set for my projects. Your excitement over this first book is a joy I carry with me every day.

Eric, my first and last reader, heart of my heart. How many times did you read the manuscript, through so many stages of revision and polish? And always eagerly, as if it were the book you’d been camped outside the bookstore to buy the moment it hit the shelves. I am acutely aware of how fortunate I am to live this life with you, and how lucky I am to have your constant love by my side and your brilliant mind bouncing ideas with me. Thank you for long drives that have made all the difference, long talks about the imaginary characters in my head, and long horizons we’ve dreamed of together. Thank you for a million reasons—and more.

About the Author

HALLIE SHEPHERD is a screenwriter, actor, and producer. She is a Pacific Northwest native who now lives in LA with her filmmaker husband. This is her debut novel.

To learn more about the author, visit hallieshepherd.com or follow @hallie.shepherd on Instagram for updates.

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Copyright

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

call off the dark. Copyright © 2026 by Quills and Thrills LLC. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Without limiting the exclusive rights of any author, contributor or the publisher of this publication, any unauthorized use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies is expressly prohibited. HarperCollins also exercise their rights under Article 4(3) of the Digital Single Market Directive 2019/790 and expressly reserve this publication from the text and data mining exception.

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first edition

Cover design by Brian Moore

Cover images © Getty Images (forest); Shutterstock (forest); Sybille Sterk /Arcangel Images (wolf )

Title page photo © Tedi S Photography/stock.adobe.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Shepherd, Hallie author

Title: Call off the dark : a novel / Hallie Shepherd.

Description: First edition. | New York, NY : William Morrow, 2026.

Identifiers: LCCN 2025048978 | ISBN 9780063489516 hardcover | ISBN 9780063489493 ebook

Subjects: LCGFT: Thrillers (Fiction) | Novels

Classification: LCC PS3619.H4547 C35 2026

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025048978

Digital Edition SEPTEMBER 2026 ISBN: 978-0-06-348949-3

Print ISBN: 978-0-06-348951-6

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