More words. No sense.

  “You didn’t come,” Sasha repeats, once or twice. “I didn’t know why you weren’t there…” Most unbelievably, it was because Pip had a girlfriend. A girlfriend who wasn’t Sasha. Sasha, who had spent her twenties casually recovering from a stolen, forgotten kiss in a rickety tree-ruin. A kiss that at this point is old news anyway, apparently, and all of this is too much to believe.

  Here, Autumn doesn’t say anything at all for a long time. She only looks at Sasha and sees too much, with soft eyes that ease back Sasha’s skin, nudge apart her ribs, and touch the center of her. “That was a long time ago for me,” she says. “I always wanted to tell you. But you know me. I was never such a quick learner. It took me a while to come to terms with myself and catch up.” Catch up. Catch up. And now, Autumn has lived an entire other life, in a world where Sasha is now outdated, a milk carton left in the fridge too long—

  Sasha leaves through the bakery’s back door. The sky is still dark. She walks home along the road, glancing around her every so often at the far-off glow of house fires. Even Honeysuckle House seems to flicker in shadows, but she doesn’t give it half a glance. It’s all just dream stuff. Her mind wheels. She lands, a bird in a storm, on random branches, random moments of Autumn’s telling.

  “So you think we’re what—frozen in time?”

  “I think you must be,” Autumn admits. “This town is all the same as it was in the nineties. No cell phones, no gay marriage, and Trump’s just that guy from Home Alone.” Her lip quirks up. “No one’s heard of 9/11 or COVID-19, which is actually a little nice.” She pauses, shakes herself out of the ramble. “No place is this isolated.” Autumn twitches for Sasha’s hand but doesn’t quite take it. “You can’t tell me how long you’ve been here. I think whatever’s doing this doesn’t want you to know. Doesn’t want you to think about it.”

  The house is unlocked for her, and she staggers inside, easing herself onto the couch with geriatric care. It’s dark like only early morning is, a dark that is also cold and damp from a long steep in the night air. The TV sits on the floor across the room, where she and Mom and Lil had watched the horrible series finale of that doctor-drama show St. Elsewhere, where it turned out that the hospital was just a figment of a little boy’s imagination, caught in a snow globe. Nobody liked that shitty ending. Now it feels like it was Sasha herself caught in a glass ball of unreality, rattled around in a child’s scrawny grip.

  All these trips from one riverbank to the other. Countless nights porting shadows. On that side, the world of the living; on this side, this strange, frozen purgatory. Who have her passengers been? Who can come and go, between human time and the underworld?

  Has she been ferrying the dead?

  Yet, Autumn got in. She came home.

  “But why didn’t you tell me as soon as you came back?”

  Thumbprint cookies. A walk in the woods. Autumn was lost momentarily for words at that.

  “Whatever is keeping you and everyone else under pulled me in too for a minute,” Autumn recalls. “The first few…days? Weeks? I was so disoriented. I remembered certain things, like Netflix, like my friends, but I forgot—” Tears glimmer to life in her eyes. “I forgot my parents were gone.” Autumn isn’t Lil, who fights grief like it’s a straitjacket. Autumn just feels it, lets it pour from her eyes. “I thought they were just on their trip.” It feels wrong to just watch her cry, but if Sasha is going to comfort her, she’ll have to move, and Sasha can’t move.

  Autumn gathers herself. “The longer I was here, the more I began to remember the things that weren’t right. I asked you how long you were going to be here and remembered I hadn’t expected you to be here at all. I saw the pecan children and remembered I’d come here for them. I saw one of Dad’s sweaters in my closet one day and suddenly I remembered they were gone.” More pearl-shine tears slip down her cheeks. “After that, it was easy to remember everything. And I just had to figure out how to tell you.”

  There’s a ferocious burn on the horizon, but Sasha isn’t sure if it’s the sunrise or just another phantom blaze.

  On the porch, there’s a hard bang, like a body against the door.

  The doorknob rattles, then gives. Sasha stands swiftly, heart thundering in her chest.

  Lil crashes into the house. She’s barefoot and her clothes are so ruined, so covered in dirt that, for a brief flash of horror, Sasha imagines it’s their mother returned from her grave. She doesn’t even register Sasha, but catches herself on the frame, raises bloodshot eyes and stumbles toward the kitchen.

  “Lil?” Sasha trails after her, stunned by the night’s second slap. “Wh—”

  Lil collapses at the table, shivering, and then reaches for the phone. Through a gap in her shirt, her shoulder is red and blistered.

  “Holy shit.” Sasha ducks back into the sitting room to grab up their ancient monster of an aloe vera plant, stuffing the first aid kit under her arm on her way back. “We need to go to the ER—”

  Except if Autumn was telling her the truth, there’s no way to get there. The road is closed. And despite that longing in her gut, Sasha’s never stepped off the ferry onto the other bank.

  Could they really be trapped here?

  Sasha forces down a claustrophobic panic. She lays her supplies on the table. Lil has her ear to the phone receiver, listening to an endless ring. “What the hell happened?”

  Lil finally looks at her, rather than through her. “Honeysuckle House burned last night.”

  There is a long, fumbling silence, Sasha’s new preferred form of communication, apparently. She gapes at Lil’s injuries: the worst is that burn on her shoulder, which definitely needs a dressing. “Burned burned?” she clarifies anyway. “I was on the road and…” But when had she even walked by there? Her own night was a blur too tender to probe. “Where’s Jason?”

  Lil’s reddened fingers tighten around the phone, ringing endlessly. It must hurt to touch anything. Even so, Sasha longs to reach for her, wrap her up tight, prove to herself that at least her sister is still real. “I don’t know. I can’t find him. I think he might be in there somewhere.” Lil slams the phone down. “This is useless,” she snaps. “I have to go back.”

  “Sit still,” Sasha cracks back, ripping thick fleshy leaves from the aloe vera for a salve. “You need a bandage on your shoulder.”

  Lil looks ready to protest, but when she meets Sasha’s eye, whatever fight brought her here seems to abandon her. “I don’t know what happened,” she says. “I didn’t notice it burning down around us.”

  That—Sasha just moves on from that. It’s immediately clear what was going on; Jason and Lil have a history of drowning in each other. “You need new clothes—we should just cut these off,” she says.

  “We have to go back out there,” Lil says, but she lets Sasha slice off what’s left of her jacket to look at her shoulder. She just presses her knuckles to her mouth and turns away like Sasha would care if she cries. Working with farm equipment, plus a reticence toward paying for outside help, ensures that everyone on an orchard has some basic first aid skills. Sasha swiftly plunders the supplies they have, triages the burns, and sets to work. That blistered place on her shoulder outpaces the rest of the angry red marks. The soles of her feet are almost as bad, cut from walking through debris. Another streaky red mark curves around the ridge of Lil’s ribs. It’s only when the light hits right that its shape becomes clear. A handprint, swollen, raised, burned into her skin. Sasha stares at this for a long time.

  Where was Jason?

  Soon, she’s done all she can. “Take these,” Sasha says, shaking several aspirin into Lil’s singed palm. “You stay here and rest. I’ll go look.”

  “No.” Lil cuts over her, catching her wrist. “You’re not going out there alone. I’m coming.”

  “Dammit, Lil, you’re hurt,” Sasha bursts out, eyes suddenly brimming. It’s half exhaustion. The sun is up, but this night feels like it will never end. “Your feet look bad.”

  “You can’t stop me,” Lil says and doesn’t let go. “If he’s there, I can’t stay here. And I’m not risking you disappearing too. You try to go without me, I’m walking back out there anyway. So wait for me to change and we’ll drive.”

  For a moment they glare at one another, Sasha caught in her grasp. Swallowing hard, she turns her hand over to grip her sister back, very gently. And then Sasha follows Lil to the laundry room to help her get out of the rags she’s wearing and ease into whatever clothes they find in the dryer.

  They drive, Sasha behind the wheel, creeping down the road like it might come unbraided at any moment. She turns at the Finch driveway, gasping softly at the smoldering ruin of Honeysuckle House. There are no fire trucks, no cops. The disaster has gone, apparently, totally unnoticed by the town, despite the gutter of black smoke above.

  Sasha parks closer than is probably safe and jumps down from the truck cab. Immediately, the dirty, chemical air of the burn torches her lungs and she coughs. “Didn’t you say he was going to grill?” she rasps. “Maybe the charcoal was still hot and the wind…” It was an old, dry house. There could be ancient wiring in there, old gas lines, parched insulation…

  “We didn’t even know it was happening. I woke up and he was gone, but he wouldn’t just leave me.” Lil stares out at the trees, probably still looking for a figure among them. “It’s like I was drunk. Or under a spell. I don’t know how I didn’t…”

  Sasha climbs the porch steps. They moan ominously. The once grand entrance hall is visible, since the front of the house has caved in, no more than a slumping portico and gray ash now. The curve of a staircase is as unreal as a charcoal sketch. “Jason,” she calls through the sooty gloom of early morning. “Jason!” Picking her way through the debris, the hanging cables, the split kindling of the floor, she searches. Together, they overturn charred remains, peek through improbable crannies created in the collapse, wander through the house’s soiled decadence. The chandelier crashed and shards of crystal now scatter across the scarred beams below. Lil limps badly. They shout up the remains of the stairs but don’t dare test the second floor. He’s nowhere to be found.

  Lil finally sits down on the front steps, digging her hands into her short hair. White bandages peak from under her cuff. “Sasha,” she says. “What do we do?”

  There are suddenly so many reasons to ask this question, and Sasha has no answer for any of them. But, for once, Lil is asking. Sasha has to answer. “We have to go to town. We can—get some more help. We need the sheriff. A—bigger search party.”

  “Yes.” Lil stands, stronger now that she has a purpose. “Okay. Everyone will be at the festival. We can find help there.”

  They get back in the truck, and Sasha turns the ignition over, her eyes still on the house. Nothing smokes now; in fact, the air is cold. The house looks like an ancient ruin, long derelict. Abandoned for decades. And then—she almost knocks her hand on the windshield, craning to watch.

  “Do you see that?” she breathes to Lil.

  Lil follows her gaze.

  The house flickers, a guttering candle. One moment, it lies in miserable decay, a moldering wreck. Then, like light splitting in a prism, she tips her head and there is the house, whole, complete, just as she’s known it all her life. Another erratic blink and it’s skeletal again. There’s a blurring, like one of her long-exposure photographs in the dark room, when the shutter can’t capture a shift. The haze of unreality.

  Shattering time.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The first morning of the Pecan Festival is in full swing. Carnival music jumbles over the crowd from the carousel, and someone’s complaining about the spiced cider running low by midmorning. And Autumn sits behind her stand, gnawing on a nutty bunny, watching her baked goods dwindle, and trying to pretend this is normal.

  With the truth out, all her unspoken words finally spoken, Autumn thought she would feel braver, freer than she does. Maybe it’s the way Sasha looked at her last night, for the first time like Autumn was some kind of alien. Maybe it’s returning to the Pecan Festival to man her stand, surrounded by her old neighbors who are unburdened with the knowledge she has.

  Autumn poured out thirty years of bound-up heartache. And Sasha listened. Questioned her. Protested. They talked late into the night, and in the morning, Sasha begged off. I need to think, she said. Okay, Autumn replied. I’ll stop by later, Sasha promised. No, yeah, of course. That’s fine, Autumn assured her, but it wasn’t. Finding Sasha back in her life was a miracle she’d stopped hoping for out in the world. But it happened; Autumn got Sasha back. And now Sasha likely wanted nothing to do with her.

  The longer it takes for Sasha to return, the more frequently the anxious tidal waves hit her. She feels the roil in her stomach and braces herself for the next one.

  Across the street, a little ghost crosses between two tables. She starts, sitting up fast. Was that—

  “—tumn? Autumn, dear?”

  Someone’s speaking to her. Autumn pulls herself out of the murk and shades her eyes. Cork stands over her with a genial smile. The sun shines so brightly, his cheeks, temples—those places where bone protrudes—are thrown into sharp relief. Cork, the elderly, wispy janitor at the town hall. Before Autumn left, before the town became this nightmare, he was already getting on in years. It was taking him longer and longer every day to sweep the steps. She left in 1989, last spoke to Sasha in 1995, which means that, like a fly preserved in amber, he should be dead—

  “Goodness, dear, you’ve gone pale,” Cork says and offers her his hand. “Can I get you some water?”

  “No, thank you,” Autumn says. Returning his gesture, she cranes her head, searching over his shoulder for the little bare feet, the mane of matted hair. “I’m just tired.”

  “I just came to buy some pound cake. But can I do anything?” he asks.

  “No, I just need…” Behind Cork, the small figure darts through the shadows. Autumn shoots to her feet. “Actually yes. Watch my stand.”

  “Sure, if that’s what you—”

  “Thanks, Cork.” Autumn is off already, rushing to meet the child who creeps around the side of her bakery.

  She finds Wyn pushing at the doorknob at the back door. He glares suspiciously over at her approach, poised to flee—but instantly relaxes when he sees who it is. That trust slightly soothes the hurricane in her gut. “Loud,” he complains, kicking in the direction of the square.

  “I know.” Autumn grins at him and comes forward to unlock the door. “I’m glad to see you. Want to go inside? It’s a lot…quieter…”

  He’s holding something protectively close to his stomach, a tangled web of twigs, angles carefully wrapped in reeds. It’s one of those Cajun bird traps, quite a bulky burden for him to have brought here. At its heart, an enormous insect. It has been painstakingly preserved, the delicate wings the color of milky jade. A lunar moth, carefully pinned in place. “I made this,” Wyn whispers. “So he don’t get you.”

  The hungry man. A grotesque folktale come to life. Maybe the monsters of children are always more real than adults want to think. Autumn kneels beside him and reaches out. He places it in her hands. “Thank you.” His little face is familiar now. Despite herself, she wants to find some similarity in their features. There isn’t any, but her heart has felt something in common with him from the beginning. Some sameness under the skin, something in how they were made that rings true together. “What do I need to do with it? Put it up in my bakery?”

  Wyn considers this, pushing his small fingers into his cheek thoughtfully. He points toward the front. “Put it—um—put it in that big window.” They go inside, and he shows her where, just at the corner of the front window, close to the front door. “There.” He has found one of her trays of festival goodies along the way and is cramming a maple bar in his mouth.

  Autumn spends too much time setting it just so, turning it so that the wings catch the light. “You know…” Courage, Autumn. She barely touches one of the legs of the altar. “You could stay here sometime if you want. It’s cold out, and I have room if you need a warm place.”

  Before he can quell it, the quickest spark of hope lights in Wyn’s face and nearly cracks her heart. “Neel,” he reminds her.

  “I want Neel to come,” Autumn assures him. “I know he doesn’t want to yet, but if he got to know me a little better, that could change.”

  They both ponder for a moment as Wyn chews. Then he makes a cautious suggestion. “Maybe…maybe we go out there and we try again.”

  She takes a chance and sits close enough to him that he can reach out if he wants. “What you said to me about…the hungry man…was really scary. If you were here, I could keep you both safe.” In the window, the trap stands strange and lovely. “We could keep each other safe.”

  They sit there together, the wings of the moth shivering. Slowly, she feels a cold hand slip into hers. The small fingers are slightly sticky from syrup. “Okay.”

  ***

  Lil’s throat aches from the combination of dehydration and smoke by the time she and Sasha walk into the Pecan Festival. But she won’t admit it any more than she will be deterred. Her body thirsts for sleep, aloe, and a warm, soft place where she can heal. But she can’t listen to it. Lil isn’t made to be coddled, even by herself. And fear won’t let her rest; it’s louder than her pain. Her best medicine is action. Answers.

  Slightly hunched, Sasha stays close to her side. The strain is clear in her face, the tight, miserable pinch of her mouth that makes her look so much like Mom. She’s checking on Lil every fifteen seconds or so. Children run close to their legs, and one of them knocks into Sasha’s knee so it overbends, and she huffs out a pained breath.

  Under the proud banners of Mom and Marigold Finch, the Pecan Festival has risen to the challenge of Lil’s dreams. Her hopes. Strangers, unrecognizable faces, rush around her, buying roasted pecans, flooding the streets, and not a single fire is glowing on the ridge. Kids giggle past. A live band, slightly off-key, echoes just off the square. Lil’s head feels attached by an ever-thinning tether.