Her fever lasted for two days, so maybe it was only a dream. But when Patricia got older she forgot what she was wearing the day Carter proposed, she forgot whether Blue’s high school graduation was outdoors on a sunny day or in the gym because it rained, and she even forgot the date of her wedding anniversary, but she never forgot opening her eyes one bright November afternoon and feeling a dry, smooth hand stroke her cheek, and seeing a pair of black shoes standing beside her bed.

They were ugly shoes, practical, and low—schoolteacher’s shoes. The legs in them wore nude pantyhose, and they rose up to the hem of a plaid cotton dress, but she was too weak to lift her head and see the rest. Then the shoes turned, and walked out of her bedroom, and what Patricia would always remember about Miss Mary wasn’t those hard meals, or the shock of finding her that night after Grace’s party, or the roach falling into her water glass, but it was how much you had to love your son to come back from Hell to warn him.

And then she remembered that Miss Mary hadn’t come back to warn Carter. She’d came back to warn her.

Her fever broke that same afternoon. One minute she felt drugged and sweaty, in a sleep so deep she couldn’t crawl out. The next minute everything felt clear, and she blinked in the sunlight and sat up in bed, sweat drying on her skin, eyes sharp. She heard the toilet flush and Grace came out of the bathroom.

“Good, you’re awake,” Grace said. “Would you like a glass of water?”

“I’m hungry,” Patricia said.

Before Grace could get her something, Carter burst into the room.

“She’s awake,” Grace told him.

“It’s good to have you back,” he said. “You’ve been running a fever. I was getting ready to take you to the hospital if it didn’t break by tonight.”

“I feel all right,” Patricia said. “Just hungry. Where are Blue and Korey?”

“They’re fine,” he said. “Listen, we’re going to lose—” Then he remembered Grace. “I appreciate you being here, but I’d like some privacy with my wife.”

Patricia nodded to her, and Grace said, “I’ll check back with you this evening,” and left the room.

Carter sat in the chair Grace had been sitting in beside the bed.

“We’re going to lose Gracious Cay,” he said. “Leland can’t hold on to it with James Harris gone. He had a lot of money in escrow, and some of it’s just not there anymore. We’re already getting nervous investors after that fire, and if they hear Jim’s gone and Leland can’t find a lot of the cash, we’re going to lose what we put in. Do you have any idea where he’s gone? His house is totally empty.”

“Carter,” Patricia said, pushing herself up in bed. “I don’t want to talk about this right now. I want to talk about when we’re bringing Korey home.”

“A man is missing,” Carter said. “Jim meant a lot to this family, he meant a lot to the kids, and he meant a lot to that project. If you know anything at all about where he might be, I need you to tell me.”

“I don’t know anything about James Harris,” she said.

She must not have said it very convincingly because Carter took it as proof that she knew something.

“Is this about your obsession?” he asked, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. “Did you go off the deep end again and say something to him? Patty, I swear, if you’ve messed this up for everyone…you don’t even know how many families you might have affected. There’s Leland, us, Horse and Kitty…”

He got up and began to walk circles in the room, still talking on and on about James Harris, escrow accounts, missing money, and principal investments, and Patricia realized she didn’t recognize this man anymore. The quiet boy from Kershaw she’d fallen in love with was dead. In his place stood this resentful stranger.

“Carter,” she said. “I want a divorce.”

* * *

—

Two days later, Patricia dragged herself out of bed and drove downtown to see Slick in the hospital. She was dozing when Patricia arrived, so Patricia sat and waited for her to wake up. Slick looked sallow, and her chest hitched occasionally as she breathed. They had her on a full oxygen mask now, trying to keep her levels up. Patricia remembered stumbling across James Harris asleep all those years ago and thinking he was dead. That was how Slick looked.

“Grace already…told me,” Slick said, opening her eyes, pulling her mask away from her face to speak. “I made her…give me all the details.”

“Me too,” Patricia said. “I was out from what he did to me.”

“How did…it feel?” Slick asked.

Patricia never would have said this to anyone but Slick. She leaned forward.

“It felt so good,” she breathed, then immediately remembered what he’d done to Slick and felt selfish and insensitive.

“Most sin does,” Slick said.

“I know why they hurt themselves,” Patricia said. “It’s this feeling of things being whole and stable and warm and safe, and you want it back so badly, but it’s just slipping away over the horizon and you feel like you’ll never get it back again and you don’t want to live without it. But then you just keep living and it hurts all the time. Everything feels like knives on my skin and my joints ache.”

“What…did he do to us?” Slick asked. “He made us…murderers…and we betrayed…everything…and now it’s all falling apart…”

Patricia took Slick’s hand that didn’t have an IV needle in it.

“The children are safe,” Patricia said. “That’s what matters.”

Slick’s throat worked for a minute, and then she said, “Not the…ones in…Six Mile…”

Patricia’s blood felt like lead in her veins.

“Not all of them,” she said. “But your children, and Maryellen’s children, and Kitty’s. Mrs. Greene’s boys. He’s been doing this for a long time, Slick. No one’s ever stopped him before. We did. We paid a price but we stopped him.”

“What about…me?” Slick asked. “Am I…going to get better?”

For a moment, Patricia thought about lying but they’d been through too much together to do that now.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think you are. I’m so sorry.”

Slick’s hand gripped hers so hard Patricia’s fingers felt like they were about to break.

“Why?” Slick asked behind her mask.

“Mrs. Greene told me he said something before he died,” Patricia said. “I think this is how he makes other ones like him. I think that’s what he did to you.”

Slick stared at Patricia, and Patricia saw her eyes turn red and bloodshot and then Slick nodded.

“I feel…something growing…inside,” Slick said. “It’s waiting for me…to die…and then…it hatches.”

She put a hand to the base of her throat.

“Here,” she said. “Something…new…hard to swallow…”

They sat quietly for a while, holding hands.

“Patricia…” Slick said. “Bring…Buddy Barr tomorrow…I want to…change my will…I want to…be cremated…”

“Of course,” Patricia said.

“And make sure…I’m not alone…”

“You don’t have to worry about that,” Patricia said.

And she didn’t. Someone from book club was with her all the way to the end. On Thanksgiving day, when Slick started having trouble breathing, and her oxygen count began to fall, and she lost consciousness for the last time, Kitty was there, reading to her from In Cold Blood. Even after the crash team burst into the room and surrounded Slick and crowded Kitty into a corner, she kept reading silently, just moving her lips, whispering the words from the book like a prayer.

* * *

—

A few days after Slick’s funeral, Ragtag started walking in circles. Patricia noticed he’d follow rooms around their edges, always turning to the left, never to the right. He sometimes bumped into doors on his way through them. She took him to Dr. Grouse.

“I’ve got two pieces of bad news for you,” he said. “The first is that Ragtag has a brain tumor. It won’t kill him today or tomorrow, and he’s not in any pain, but it’s going to get worse. When it does, bring him here and we can put him to sleep.”

The second piece of bad news was that the tests to find the tumor cost five hundred and twenty dollars. Patricia wrote him a check.

When she returned home, she told Blue. The first thing he said was, “We need to get Korey.”

“You know we can’t do that,” she told him.

She didn’t think they could do that? They’d paid for Korey to stay at Southern Pines for eight weeks, and she had a whole program of therapists and counselors and doctors, and they all kept telling Patricia she had trouble sleeping, and seemed restless, anxious, and unfocused, and it would be unwise to pull her out prematurely. But when she’d visited the day before, Korey had seemed clear-eyed and calm, even though she didn’t say much.

“Mom,” Blue said, talking like she was hard of hearing. “Ragtag is older than me. You got him for Korey’s first Christmas. If he’s sick, he’s going to be scared. He needs her.”

Patricia wanted to argue. She wanted to point out that they couldn’t interrupt Korey’s program, that the doctors knew best. She wanted to tell him that Ragtag wouldn’t know whether Korey was there or not. She wanted to tell him that Korey mostly ignored Ragtag, anyway. Instead, she realized that she wanted Korey to come home very badly and so she said, “You’re right.”