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I was up and at the door with my hand already on the knob before I registered that I’d stopped being a person who takes ten seconds to decide whether to open a door.

There were two women on the step and a casserole dish between them.

“We debated this,” the taller one said. “Whether to come tonight or leave you alone. I lost.”

“You didn’t lose, you were outvoted.”

“Raven outvoted me. That’s losing.”

Raven shifted the dish to one hip. Small, slight, dark hair loose down her back, and the scars on both forearms went wrist to elbow and she made no attempt to angle them away from the porch light. I’d seen forearms like that before. Not often, and not on anybody who let you look.

“You’ve met me,” she said. “Sort of. This is Violeta. She’s married to Rocket.”

“I don’t know who Rocket is.”

“You will. Everyone does.” Violeta came in past me without waiting to be asked, which turned out to be exactly the right move, because I would have said no. She put the dish on the counter and started opening cupboards like she’d lived there. “Where do they keep… nothing. There’s nothing in here. Raven, there’s nothing in this entire kitchen.”

“It’s a Prospect house.”

“It’s a crime.”

She found two mismatched mugs and a fork and gave up on the rest, and then all three of us were sitting at a table too small for it.

I waited for the questions. I had answers loaded for all of them. Are you all right, what happened at the clinic, what’s going on with you and Patch, how long are you staying, do you know what you’re getting into.

Nobody asked me one of them.

“So the thing nobody’s going to tell you,” Violeta said, “is that the food situation runs on a schedule and you’re not on it. It’s sort of a new thing we’ve started. Not sure it’s going to last long, but we decided to mix things up and give it a try. Sundays at Fox and Raven’s. Wednesdays whoever’s turn it is. If you don’t show up, somebody brings it to you, and if you send it back untouched twice, Bear comes.”

“Bear comes?”

“Bear comes,” Raven confirmed.

“What does that mean?”

“It means a very large man with a silver beard sits in your kitchen until you eat something.” Violeta was eating my casserole with the fork she’d found. “It’s happened to me. It’s mortifying. It works.”

I laughed. It surprised me on the way out.

“The other thing,” Raven said, “is that nobody here is going to ask you what happened.”

I set the mug down.

“Not because we don’t care. Because half the women on this compound arrived the same way you did, in the middle of something, with a bag that didn’t take long to pack.” She said it evenly, like a woman reading off a chart. “And every one of us got asked too many questions too early by somebody who meant well. So we quit doing it. It’s not consideration. It’s a policy.” Raven’s eyes came up. “But when you do want to say it, say it to me. I went a long time not being able to talk at all, and I’ve got more patience for a slow sentence than anybody you’ve ever met.”

I looked at her forearms again. She let me.

“How long?” I asked.

“How long what?”

“Until you stopped looking for a reason to leave.”

Violeta stopped chewing.

Raven thought about it properly, which I appreciated more than a fast answer.

“About a year,” she said. “And then one day I moved a chair. Just picked it up and put it where I wanted it, and didn’t ask, and didn’t think about it until that night.” She shrugged. “That was it. That was the whole thing. A chair.”