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“How old is he?”

Heather takes a cloth from the basket and wipes a speck of dust from the windowsill of the blue room. “My dad built the house when I was seven.”

He was lying in that bed long before she ever walked into the record store. Black hair, pale face, pretty enough to break.

“How many Jamies have there been?”

Heather stops wiping. I wait for the ruler.

She takes the doll back and lays him in his bed. She arranges his hair across the pillow with the tip of one finger until it spills exactly the way it did before.

“There’s only one Jamie. You’re the seventh I’ve brought home for him.”

Six men wore my name before me. Six men she brushed and dressed and put to bed, and all of them are under the grass outside the kitchen window.

Fear arrives first. Jealousy shoves past it. “Was I the best one?”

Heather looks at me in the glow from the tiny blue room. She takes a long time deciding, or maybe she only wants me to watch her decide.

“You’re the one who’s still here.”

It’s not praise, but I take it the way I take everything she sets beside my fork.

Heather stands and takes down the last doll from the shelf. It’s bigger than the others by the width of a fingernail, but beside the Jamie doll the difference is obvious. His hair is cropped short and dark, and he’s dressed in a tiny white jacket with two rows of buttons. The stitching along the collar is neater than anything that comes from a store.

Heather sits down beside me and holds him out. “Undress him.”

I take him. The buttons on the jacket are smaller than a lentil. My fingers feel huge and clumsy working them through the holes.

Heather watches every button the way she watched me get Simon’s belt open. When the jacket finally comes loose, she holds out her palm for it and folds it once before setting it aside. The trousers are easier. Underneath, the doll is smooth and bare and blank. I hand him back to her.

She takes a narrow case from the basket and opens it on her knee. Inside are brushes, some with only a few bristles, and a row of paint pots no bigger than thimbles. She uncaps two and mixes them in the lid of a third with the tip of a brush. She lays the doll across her palm, turns his leg outward with one finger, and begins.

The first line is thin and short, high on the inside of his thigh. The second crosses it at an angle.

I watch her paint the other leg with the same concentration I use around my eyes.

When the pale lines are finished, she cleans the brush and opens a different pot, and this one is pink. She holds the brush over his thigh for a long moment. Then she lays down one short line, the color of skin that hasn’t finished healing.

She blows on the paint until it dulls, then dresses the doll herself in a pair of dark red sleep pants cut from something soft. She doesn’t offer to let me help with that part.

Then she opens the far side of the dollhouse.

I see the red room properly for the first time. The blue wallpaper is faded where the tiny lamp sits closest, and the green room’s rug has gone flat in a path from the door to the bed. Oliver’s little sheets are soft from years of smoothing, and my pillow has a dent in it. The red room has none of that. The paint on the walls is flawless. The tiny bedspread still has sharp creases from the package it came in.

She lays Simon on the bed, lifts him again, and moves him half a fingernail to the left before arranging his arms. Then she sits back on her heels.

Neither of us says anything.

Every bedroom in the house is full.

CHAPTER 28

Heather

Jamie’s shirt has three buttons at the throat. I open them slowly, and the marks surface under my fingers before the collar is fully apart. They’re darker than I expected, four ovals along one side of his neck and a broader smudge beneath his jaw where my thumb pressed. By morning they’ll be plum.

He holds still while I look.