Page 141

He sits. He looks at the dead candle. He looks at me.

Try being tired of it all. It's my newest setting.

"You're a terrible support animal."

He starts washing a paw.

I clean a house nobody has dirtied. I fold a blanket. I sort a drawer of receipts I could have burned.

My phone lights up. Cass. A number I don't know.

Then Lila, and I put the phone face down on the counter without reading it, and I don't ask myself why.

Twice I go to the front window and look at his house across the frozen grass, and both times there's a truck in the yard that isn't his with someone sitting in the bed of it holding a thermos.

He's not coming. He's doing the other thing. The thing he does instead of coming, which is standing exactly far enough away to catch me if I fall and never close enough to be told to leave.

By four I hate him. By four fifteen I miss him, which is worse.

At five thirty the sky goes the color of weak tea and I remember the mask table is still out under the shop awning.

Two hundred rented masks, four days before the town walks into the Hollis mansion wearing them all.

I go out the kitchen door with the shop key in my fist.

The cold is bitter tonight. Frost is already crawling up the porch boards, and the fog has come in low and lain down across the yards like it plans to stay.

My porch skeleton has turned its head toward the road again.

The pumpkins on my steps have gone soft in the cheeks. Four days ago they were perfect. Everything in this town is rotting on schedule.

I'm halfway across the grass when I see her.

She's standing at the end of my walk, right where my grass gives up and the road begins. Tiny. Silver bun. Reading glasses on a beaded chain, oatmeal cardigan buttoned all the way to her throat, hands folded in front of her like a woman waiting for a church service to start.

"Hello, sweetheart."

I stop where I am. "You're not coming in."

"I'm not asking to." She sounds embarrassed for herself. "I did that already and it was rude, and it didn't work, and I've thought about it since."

"Good."

"I'd like you to come out."

My whole spine goes to ice.

"No."

"Of course not." She smiles at me, warm as a kitchen. "Not yet. Can I say one thing and then go? One thing, and I'll walk away, and you can stand there and hate me from your own grass."

I should turn around. I know I should turn around.

"Say it."

"The coven picked you before you were born, dear. Generations before. Your blood picked you, and nobody's ever going to hand you a form to sign about that."

Her voice is so kind. That's the weird part.