My GPS leads me through twinkling dusk back into nowhereland, trees breaking every now and then to reveal a breathtaking view of mountains. Headlights splash across a fluorescent dead-end warning that someone’s repainted to read Hannobar Lane, and my blood hums with awareness. We know this place, we know this place, my instincts sing, nostalgia too large to fit properly inside the brief time that spawned it, which couldn’t have lasted longer than four months. One familiar landmark jump-starts recollection of another, and another, and even though memories of my surroundings were obscured by grainy film fifteen minutes ago, this terrain has become back-of-my-hand in a snap. The Civil War–era smokehouse that leans at forty-five degrees and the cemetery with time-smoothed gravestones are old friends. I know where the dented guardrail’s going to be before it enters my field of vision, and I know who dented it.

Around one last bend, beams from a rising moon surge down like stalactites and I automatically slow, squinting to make out a succession of threatening signs. no trespassing. private property. beware of dog. beware of bears. you’re under surveillance. My heart beats in my throat. Tears spring to my eyes, but they won’t fall.

You should have come back long before now, I think. She might have needed you. Now it’s too late.

And then I hold my breath, because:

Falling Stars sprawls grandly before me. The manor’s pink masonry is the color of twilight on a hydrangea sea, four chimneys jutting against a cold, black sky carved out of mountainsides. Every tree and flower, every blade of grass and stepping stone, is precise. Intentional. Short, neat hedgerows border an obsessively manicured lawn.

Years one through nine of my life were a blur of “Don’t touch that” and “You can have the sofa tonight, but tomorrow you have to find somewhere else to go.” I was the burden in guest rooms, top bunks, and at kitchen tables, the kid without a seat belt because the car was already packed with cousins we had to cram into the back of a sedan. From years eleven to seventeen Mom and I couldn’t depend on family anymore, having alienated them all by asking for help so many times, so I roughed it with my mother and grew up fast. When I think about the dozens of roofs I’ve ever had over my head, there is one to rule them all, to which I have compared every other roof. Nothing can live up to it.

For one glorious summer, I was welcomed and wanted. We established our own unique family rituals straightaway: bird-watching in the morning, stories before bed. I helped water the violets that burst along pathways, feeling like the little girl from The Secret Garden, learning the names of all sorts of plants I’ve since forgotten. I wasn’t merely being cared for, I was building a life.

The reason my imagination is such a runaway is because no matter what’s happened and where I’ve gone since then, in the back of my mind I’ve always known a place like this has been allowed to exist. Well maintained and ageless, a world locked inside a snow globe.

Except it isn’t.

What used to be rolling hills with an edge of woods is now overrun by them, that once-distant forest so close that it’s now in danger of eating up the house as well. Vines have overtaken the manor. They crawl the walls, chipping stonework away. My headlights pour through ground-floor windows, smashed out, blades winking like shark’s teeth.

Strips of black-spotted plaster hang from ceilings. The walls peel. Strange, dark shapes rise all the way up to the chandeliers. Falling Stars has been consumed by disease, more like Sleeping Beauty’s castle after the curse took hold. The house isn’t even pink anymore: it’s silver gossamer.

I exhale a sharp denial. “No.” Violet took such amazing care of her house—daily dusting, vacuuming, mopping. Never a burned-out lightbulb left sitting in a fixture, never a book put away crookedly in the library. Beds were made as soon as you woke up, plates were washed right after you ate off them, and you folded your clothes when they were still warm from the dryer. This estate was her pride and joy. She ran it like a queen.

My attention is drawn to two squares of light tucked into nearby trees. Windows. And attached to them, a triangular cabin. It used to be Uncle Victor’s work shed, but when I went exploring as a kid all I found inside was a hot, dark mess of rusted farm equipment and spiderwebs. Now the lights are on and somebody’s pickup truck is parked outside.

I make my way over cautiously, the path rough and uneven where tree roots have ripped up asphalt, nature reclaiming its territory. I mentally skim through everything I know about squatter’s rights as I approach, car keys poking from my balled fist like Wolverine’s claws. The pickup truck isn’t the only unexpected company here: on its other side sits a yellow Volkswagen Beetle, just like the one Ruth Campos climbed into as we said our goodbyes.

The same Ruth who’s swinging the front door open to greet me.

“Maybell! Wonderful, you’re right on time.”

“Right on time for what?”

She answers my question with a question. “How was the trip?”

Is it me, or does she seem nervous? “I just saw the house. It’s bad. It’s real bad. I didn’t expect to see you here . . .”

I peer around her, grabbing a fleeting glimpse of a rosy, low-lit living room that contains no rusted farm equipment or spiderwebs. Instead, I find a plaid couch and a table lamp with mustangs galloping around the shade. Split-log walls. Bluish light flickers at random intervals, a television glowing somewhere within.

“Who’s out there?” a different, deeper voice inquires. I straighten.

A man abruptly fills the frame, blocking my view. I stumble and his hand shoots out on reflex, as though to help me, but I’m already backing up.

A man, and not just any man. The man. In my deepest, darkest dreams, still the only man.

He is tall, broad shouldered, strong jawed. Dark blond hair falls in short, tousled waves that make me think of a fallen angel who almost drowned, thrust out of the sea by Poseidon and made alive again with a lightning strike. His eyes are brown topaz, a glass of root beer held up to the light, widening as he fixates on my face. Every thought that’s ever swept into my head in the thirty years I’ve been alive blows away. There is dust in my throat, my eyes, my ears.