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She picked up the diary and opened it at the list of names. “The ledger. You must speak every name. If your voice goes, another must replace you, even mid-name. The list cannot stop, and it cannot start over. They’ve waited long enough.”

Priya raised her hand like she was in a classroom, which in a way, we were. “What if we say one wrong?”

“You correct yourself swiftly,” she said, then looked at each one of us. “The severing calls home everything he has taken. From all of them, all the way back. You and the women you recruited will be as sick as dogs when the severing happens, but by morning you’ll be more whole than you are today.”

She went to an old cedar chest under the window and knelt to open it, and it filled the space with the scent of wool and cedar and lavender.

She pulled out four gray robes made from felted wool, a line of rust-red thread running through each hem like a vein. She held one up and looked at it, then at us, and for the first time since I’d met her, uncertainty touched her voice. My own throat caught.

“I stitched these the winter after my mother died,” she said. “Nineteen eighty-two. I didn’t know who they would be for, but I knew there would be four of you.”

She held the robe out to me. “There’s salt in the seams and a mark inside each collar that sits against your spine. You’ll never see it, but it will stay with you.”

I held out my arms, and she robed me first, as the eldest, then Priya, then Callie, then Jess, her thumbs flattening the collars.

“They fit close enough,” she said, stepping back to take us in.

“They’re perfect,” Callie said.

I studied the delicate seam work, tomorrow now feeling inevitable, like somehow, it had always been predetermined.

I heard the latch of the front door open.

“You can come inside,” Branwen said.

Damian entered and went still at the sight of us, robed and ready for our spiritual divorce. A small part of me wanted to laugh.

Branwen looked at him for a long moment, then crossed to the window, picked up a hagstone from the windowsill, and pressed it into his palm. She closed his hand around it with both of hers.

“Keep them safe,” she said, glancing at me. “And for goodness sake, keep yourself safe, Damian.”

“I will,” he said.

“Now, we’re not saying goodbye tonight. Goodbye is only for people who don’t intend to come back, and you are coming back.”

She wrapped the bowl in the linen cloth and handed it to me. Then everything else. I placed it all in my bag.

“Marlowe, you must return these things to me personally. Each one must stay in my family line.”

“Of course,” I said, out of habit, but this time I meant it.

Outside, dusk had refused to yield, its pale midsummer glow still lighting the fog.

We drove through the redwoods, then past the streetlights and gas stations and taco trucks, our robes and implements bundled into totes and backpacks.

As we pulled up to Bayshore, I turned to the women sitting behind me. They’d been quiet for most of the ride back.

“I’ll pick you up here tomorrow at four,” I said.

They nodded, clutching their bags.

Later that night, after Damian had returned the truck and come back with takeout in his arms and a desperately needed bottle of wine, we sat at the kitchen table.

His phone rang. I flinched. He’d taken it off silent.

He glanced at the screen, put his finger to his lips as if to hush me, then put it on speakerphone.

“Mother.”