“You are a very good boy to stay out of the water,” Ellis said to Quercus. She rubbed the big dome of his head, smearing it with mud. “Now we have to train Raven.”

“I don’t think I’ll go in there again.”

“Please don’t.”

Raven balanced on one foot and slid the other into her boot. “But where can you swim around here? I like water when it’s hot like this.”

“I know. I miss that, too. But there isn’t anywhere to swim on this land.”

There was still enough light to walk home. They’d gone a short distance when Raven shouted, “No! Quercus, no!”

She desperately tried to haul the dog away from something. Ellis looked down at an intricate arrangement of leaves and rocks. In the middle was a raccoon skull.

“What is that?” Ellis asked.

“Nothing.”

Quercus wanted the skull.

“No!” Raven screamed.

“Quercus, sit!” Ellis said in her sternest voice.

He sat. Keith had shown her how to do that.

“Come!” Ellis said, beckoning the dog away from the skull.

Raven calmed as they left behind the nothing she had made. The arrangement of natural objects had looked eerily ritualized. Like some kind of offering. Ellis remembered Raven’s strange talk of her kidnapping, as if she saw it as a divine event. Obviously, that was Audrey Lind’s influence.

“Did you go to church when you lived in Washington?” Ellis asked as they walked.

“Why do people ask that?” she said.

“Who else asked?”

“Gram Bauhammer.”

Of course she had. Ellis had never met anyone pushier about her beliefs than Mary Carol.

“I didn’t go to church,” Raven said.

“Did you practice any particular faith?”

After a pause, she said, “No.”

Ellis sensed tension in her. She wondered why.

Quercus barked and bounded up the hill. He continued barking. Someone was there. It had to be Keith. The gate had been closed.

She told herself not to get excited, but her drubbing heart wouldn’t listen. A month and a half ago, the day after Raven arrived, Keith had returned to collect his belongings. He’d told Ellis she needed time alone with her daughter. He’d refused to say more.

Now he was back. He must have calmed down enough to talk.

But what if he was there to say goodbye? Forever?

Ellis stopped walking. Two men were in her driveway petting Quercus. She couldn’t see them well in the twilight, but whoever they were, they had climbed the fence to get in.

Ellis grabbed Raven’s arm and pulled her backward. “Don’t go up there!” she whispered.

“Why? Who is it?”

“It might be reporters.”

Raven stared at the men.

“Last week, Sondra warned me that some reporters wanted to talk to you.”

“Why is that so bad?”

She truly didn’t know. She’d had no access to phones or computers. Her abductor had kept her away from the internet to make sure she never found out who she was. The girl had no idea of the mess the media could make of her life.

“Stay here,” Ellis said. “You don’t even have pants on.”

“So what?”

“Just stay here.”

Ellis climbed the walkway stairs Max had built to negotiate the slope. The two men turned around when they heard her footfalls. They were young, in their early twenties.

Ellis stopped walking. They stared back at her. “Mom?” Jasper said.

Mom. He’d called her that. After all these years.

She and the boys stood just yards apart. They were twenty now. Both looked a lot like Jonah, Jasper especially.

It all came rushing back. Those women she’d been, the bewildered college student taking final exams with pregnancy nausea; the new wife—Jonah rubbing his hands on her belly as he spoke to his sons inside; the woman screaming in the delivery room; the mother rocking, bandaging, promising there was no such thing as monsters; the addict who walked away from her little boys—her last words to them a terrible lie of maternal love that lasts forever and ever. They all came back at once, all those women crashing together within her.

It was different from when Viola had come back. The shock of seeing her daughter without warning had mercifully deadened her senses. As had Keith leaving. What little she’d felt through the numbness mostly had to do with the abduction. This felt so much worse, maybe because her boys hadn’t been stolen as Viola had. Ellis had done the stealing. She had robbed herself of her boys.

And taken their mother from them. Why were they here, looking at her with the same ache she’d seen in their eyes the day she left?

She had to calm down. Find out why they’d come. Maybe Jonah had sent them with a message.

“Does Jonah know you’re here?” she asked.

She berated herself. Those shouldn’t have been her first words.

“No,” Jasper said.

“Where does he think you are?”

“The Outer Banks,” he said. “Last week I started summer break from college.”

Raven came to Ellis’s side. She was a sight, wet and muddy, her filthy T-shirt not covering her underpants. Her long legs looked gangly with nothing but her socks and big hiking boots. Ellis realized her own muddy appearance must look bizarre to her sons, and that wasn’t how she wanted them to see her. Their last impressions had been bad enough.