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Which would be comforting if the thought of there being an anything else didn't make my stomach drop straight to the center of the earth.

This is a disaster.

Not a real one, obviously. An emotional one. An embarrassing, entirely self-inflicted disaster involving feelings and poor impulse control and a forensic anthropologist who has somehow become the central organizing principle of my nervous system.

I should know better than to use that word so casually.

People talk about disasters like they’re some kind of atmospheric event—something you can see coming on a radar if you’re looking hard enough.

But they aren’t.

Real disaster is the slow, steady drip of a secret you thought you’d hidden well, pooling under the floorboards until the wood rots out from under your feet. You don’t hear it coming. You just wake up one morning and find out there’s nothing left beneath you but a long, fucking drop.

I’m standing by the dairy case, trying to decide if Serena is a whole-milk or an almond-milk person (almond, definitely), when I hear it.

“Excuse me, dear?”

Every muscle in my body locks.

I know that voice.

Melodic. Theatrical.

Then the expensive patchouli reaches me.

Oh, fuck.

I don’t move. I don’t breathe. I just listen, paralyzed, as she accosts a local woman by the bakery display.

“Just look at the eyes,” my mother says, her voice echoing off the linoleum. “Do you see the inner light? He’s a seeker. A genius, truly, but he’s remarkably bad with directions. He’s been missing from my frequency for weeks, and the intuitive in Ocala was very clear about this zip code. Have you seen this sweet boy? He’s clearly lost his way.”

I risk a glance around the edge of a freestanding display of cereal. She’s wearing enough flowing linen to look like she’s about to sell someone a life-changing crystal, thrusting a framed 5x7 photograph toward a baffled woman holding a loaf of sourdough. In her other arm is my dog, who is vibrating and wide eyed.

The woman squints at the photo—a glossy shot of me at age six, wearing a clip-on bowtie and an expression of pure, unadulterated misery. “Honey,” the woman says slowly, “that’s a toddler. I don’t think I’ve seen a toddler around here lately that looks like...”

“He’s a soul!” My mother counters, her jewelry clanking as she gestures wildly. “And he is currently vibrating at a Stillwater resonance. I can feel him.”

I shift sideways until the refrigerated case hides most of me from view, suddenly very invested in the nutritional information on a gallon of milk.

I’ve interviewed a man who threatened to put a bullet through my windshield before I made it back to the highway. I’ve had someone cut the brake line on a rental car. I’ve woken up in a motel room to find photographs of myself shoved under the door. Once, Simon and I spent forty minutes locked in the back room of a gas station while a man with a tire iron waited outside for me to reconsider airing an episode.

None of those situations inspired the immediate, overwhelming conviction that I should abandon my cart and flee through the emergency exit.

I start backing away, one silent step at a time, keeping my movements slow as I retreat toward the fluorescent sanctuary of the frozen-food aisle.

If I can make it past the pizza rolls before she looks up, I might survive this.

Faun is a different problem.

There’s a beat of silence.

Then a sound I know intimately.

One sharp, questioning yip.

I close my eyes.

Don’t.