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Something in me closes. Quietly. Like a ward.

She could have opened it all now. She had the sentence right there in her mouth and she didn't do it.

"Okay," I say again, but this time it means something different, and she knows it.

I walk her out.

At the door she stops with her hand on the frame and doesn't step over. It's a long pause for a threshold.

"Don't open anything for anybody tonight," she says.

"That's what he said."

"Then he's right about one thing." She hugs me. She's tiny and she squeezes too hard, the way she always has. "Lock this behind me."

I do. Both bolts.

Through the glass I watch her cross the yard, and I watch Cass turn her head to track her all the way to the car, and I watch the red coat go into the dark. I feel exactly the way I felt at nine years old the first time an adult lied to my face and I knew but was polite about it.

Sid is sitting on the kitchen counter when I come back.

He isn't looking at me. He's looking at the loaf.

"It's bread," I tell him.

He doesn't move.

I peel the foil back. Pumpkin bread, dark and dense, still faintly warm through the towel, with walnuts baked across the top.

I've never eaten a walnut in my life. She's watched me pick them out of things since the year we met.

Then the smell comes up out of the foil and it isn't cinnamon.

Green. Dry. Scorched. I've caught it twice before, once ground into my own back step and once under my bedroom window with a burned circle split by three lines.

Burned rosemary.

I set the loaf down and back away from my own counter, and my hands are shaking, and the candles are all standing straight and white again and I didn't do that either.

Behind me, at the far end of the hall, the front door swings wide open in the dark.

Nobody's touching it.

And I can't swear it isn't me.

27

MAREN

STILL FIVE DAYS UNTIL HALLOWEEN

The front door is standing wide open, and I'm the only one left in the house to close it.

Forty feet of hallway. Cold rolling down it in a slow sheet, the good kind of October air turned into something with intent behind it. Behind me, Sid hasn't moved off the counter and hasn't said a word.

I don't run. There’s nowhere to go.

Ten feet from the doorway I can see by the porch light that the porch is empty. Cass's mug is on the rail with steam still coming off it.