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weathered tombstones clean, to wash clayorange rivulets from the fresh wound in the grass where the workmen had just finished filling in Elise’s grave. They took away the big green canopy and the plasticfalse squares of Astroturf, still another month before her marker would be delivered so there was only the uneven mound of mud, the gaudy flowers left to drown under the gray sky, wreaths of roses and carnations, Styrofoam and wire, baby’s breath and ferns. Took away all the metal folding chairs, too, except the one Chance was sitting on, and maybe they were afraid to ask for it, maybe figured it was better to come back later.
    Nothing left to say, no peace to make with a corpse as dead and still as the earth piled in on top of the casket, just the ugly hole inside Chance and nothing that would ever fill that in. A place in the world where Elise had been and that place left as empty as the moment before she was born, as empty as the moment before the universe. The price you pay for not believing in God, she thought.
    “Is that it, Elise?” and her voice so loud, so big, in the rainhushed cemetery quiet. “Do people believe so this doesn’t have to hurt so much?” and that’s all she could say because she was already crying again, her tears stolen by the rain, salt absorbed, and if only the storm could begin to dilute the drysocket ache trying to take her apart, if only she could crawl in after Elise and let the fucking worms have them both.
    But another hour, hour and a half and night coming early, and she got up, shivering, dripping, took one rose from the grave, retrieved the umbrella, and walked away down the deadstudded hill to where Joe Matthews was waiting for her in the car. And the next day Chance turned twenty-three.

    “Forgive me,” Elise says, and Chance is standing alone outside the building where Deacon lives, Quinlan Castle like a bad joke or the entrance to the world’s shoddiest amusement park; bizarre medieval façade wrapped tight around squalid little apartments, cockroaches and one whole side of the building condemned, abandoned to the homeless people who have broken in through first-floor windows and torn up the carpet for their smoky, toxic fires.
    “It wasn’t your fault,” she says, though she knows Elise can’t hear her, says it anyway as she climbs the steps, the mustydark stairwell, and the door to Deke’s third-floor apartment is painted the color of ketchup. Maybe this time she knows better than to open the door, knows better than to look inside. Maybe this time she can just turn around and what she doesn’t know really won’t hurt her, won’t hurt Elise, either. But the door’s already open, even though she doesn’t remember reaching for the handle, doesn’t even remember turning her key in the lock, and nothing’s any different this time than all the times before.
    “Were you raised in a barn?” Deacon asks, and so Chance pulls the door closed behind her. “I can’t afford to air-condition the whole goddamn building,” and she knows the old window unit hasn’t worked since last July, the apartment always so hot, never even a breeze through the open windows, but she doesn’t say anything, stands perfectly still as Elise scrambles for her clothes.
    “I thought maybe you really weren’t coming back this time,” Deke says, lifts Elise’s candypink bra off the back of his sofa and hands it to her. “I thought maybe you and that shitty old car would just keep driving. Hell, I guess I should’ve known better.”
    “You shouldn’t keep coming back here,” Elise whispers, fastens her bra and stands there in her underwear, staring down at her bare feet. “You don’t have to, you know?”
    “I know that,” Chance says, wishing she didn’t always sound so defensive, and she sets the brown bag of groceries she’s been holding down on a chair beside the door.
    “You can’t change what happened,” and the dark blood from Elise’s wrists has made a big,