The house on the walk home had stopped. A dead woman’s name, a record on the shelf, a clock that would not move. Sara answers both names because refusing the wrong one makes the walls smaller. Abigail does not fix the house. She comes so Sara is not the only one who knows what the song cost.

Abigail walked Adam’s street in the year they numbered 1986. She was not enrolled. She was not a girl among girls. She appeared in a house of bells and fluorescent light called Hazelwood West, wearing the long black dress the surface would tolerate, barefoot as the rite requires. At a corner table sat five the school had already discarded. One of them was named Sara. This book is hers.