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cynical bitch—no, she was sure she was—but she wasn’t going to trust that he was just a stranded traveler. Having him on her side could be an advantage, or it could be a huge mistake.
    She kept one eye on the basement door as she filled the kettle and set it on the stove. The sun would be up soon, and it would be too late to go to bed. Not that she could sleep, anyway, with a stranger in her basement who might or might not be trustworthy.
    Then why did you let him stay? She scrubbed her hands over her face, blocking out the kitchen, blocking out the world. Blocking out the knife drawer, the scene of so many failed attempts to escape life, escape Penance, escape everything. Was it that same self-destructive urge that had convinced her to let him in?
    It didn’t matter why she had offered up her basement, and it didn’t matter why he was here. What mattered was she had chickens to feed and chores to do.
    She had to survive, because, so far, not surviving hadn’t been an option she’d been able to follow through on.
    She left the kettle to boil, vaguely aware that it could be used as a weapon if he did sneak out of the basement. That line of thinking was counterproductive. All thinking was counterproductive. Once she thought about one aspect of her situation, she would have to think about all of it. The guy in the basement. The reason he was here. The thing that might have sent him. The town, the past, the future, all of it. The only way she got through the days and nights was by blocking all of it firmly out and pretending something else was happening.
    She drifted up the stairs, imagining it was a Friday night, and she tiptoed to avoid waking her parents, who, once upon a time, would have been sleeping behind the closed door to their room. If they found out she’d been running around at all hours, they would tan her hide. There was no way she was going to get grounded this close to the homecoming dance. She went into the bathroom and closed the door, holding her breath when the light clicked on. It was the little sounds that would wake her parents, like the light switch flicking or the creak of the floorboards in front of the sink. She shed her dirty clothes and dropped them into the hamper. Mom did wash on Fridays, so that was why it was nearly empty. Not because Jessa was the only one left.
    Downstairs, the teakettle whistled, and she closed her eyes, squeezed them shut tight against the intrusion of reality. She turned off the light and went to her bedroom, not bothering to sneak or avoid the squeaky spot in the hall. Her parents were gone. Jonathan was gone. The only things lying behind those closed doors were empty rooms, shrines to the dead she could hardly bear to look at. Everything she knew and loved had vanished, replaced by a nightmare world that mocked her with its familiarity.
    She padded across the white area rug in her room, over the stain where she and Becky had spilled the wine cooler snuck from the fridge in seventh grade. The sky outside the window, what she could see of it through the branches of the tree—the very one that Derek used to climb to get into her room at night—had lightened to the white that preceded the arrival of the sun in the sky. Another fifteen minutes, maybe, and the rooster would start crowing.
    She dressed in clean clothes, a tank top and denim shorts, and went downstairs. In the kitchen, she checked the basement door again, then put some dried raspberry leaves in a cup, pouring the steaming water from the kettle over them. Coffee, like everything else that couldn’t be grown or handmade in Penance, had gone from common item to luxury to extinction in the last five years. She had learned to substitute homemade soap for shampoo and livewith the results. Coffee…she would kill a stranger with her hands to get a cup of coffee.
    The thought of strangers brought her mind right back to the man in the basement. If he hadn’t been such a jerk, he might have actually been