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Never again. Stay in the world, Aud. Before I met her, everything had been so clear, so simple, but she had made me aware how alive and complex the world and the people in it were. And then she died, and now I couldn’t shut that awareness out again, couldn’t make it go away, and nothing made sense apart from this cabin. I could look at the wood I had hewn, the shingles I’d split and the pegs I’d hammered, and know what they meant and that they were real.
    Stay alive inside. Promise me.
    “If you could just—”
    “No.”
    A log broke open in a spume of orange sparks, and flames began to gnaw at the tilted remnants.
    I upended the bottle, swallowed the last of the whiskey, and dropped the empty on the grass. The silence lasted a long time. The flames ate their way inch by inch to both ends of the broken log, and began to die.
    “It’ll be winter soon,” he said, finally. “You won’t be able to work on the house in the snow.”
    “Once the roof’s finished and the windows are in, it’s all indoor work.”
    “Look, I know you hurt, but you’ll hurt for years. You can’t stay up here that long.”
    “I could stay here forever.”
    He studied me; his eyes reflected black, with tiny orange flames. “But you won’t?”
    I didn’t say anything.
    “We all worry.”
    I looked at him.
    He nodded. “Helen and Mick, Beatriz, Eddie, Annie.”
    Annie, weeping by her daughter’s bed as the words echoed around that white room: cerebral hemorrhage, massive brain trauma, we’ll give you a moment with her. All because of one bullet, a piece of metal an inch long. And now I was here, and she was dead, and Dornan was alive, and Tammy: alive and walking around, laughing, breathing while Julia was dead.
    All I had left of her were the promises she had asked of me. The promises I had given.
    “I’ll find her for you.”
    He turned away and poked vigorously at the fire with a stick. “Good,” he said after a while. “We’ll go back to the city in the morning.”
    “You go. Bring back everything that might help us find out where Tammy is. Bring the mail from her apartment. Bring anything she sent you in the last few months: phone messages, cards, letters, photos. All of it.” The lovesick fool would have kept everything, just as I would have kept Julia’s letters, if I’d had any. “I’ll need other things, too. I’ll give you a list.”
    I didn’t want to go back to Atlanta, to the house with the unfinished chair I had worked on while thinking of Julia, to the rug where she had curled up one evening, and the laundry on the floor that smelled of her: of sunshine and musk and dusty violets, of her rich skin, and her hair, oh dear god her hair…
    “What?” Dornan said.
    “There’s a sofa bed in the trailer,” I said harshly. “Go inside and leave me alone.”
    I watched the rest of the stars come out, one by one, and tried to catch back that fleeting sense memory, her scent before she ended up wired to those machines, smelling of pain and medication and death.
    An owl screamed in the wood and I wanted to ride behind its eyes when it plunged its talons into living flesh, wanted to tear something warm and soft to pieces while it squealed; wanted something else to hurt.
    I dreamt of the phone ringing, the answering machine in Atlanta blinking red as messages piled up.
    Beep.
    A tremulous southern voice: “Aud, this is Annie. Why did you leave? You killed my daughter. She would be alive if she hadn’t gone to Norway. If she hadn’t loved you. You killed her and I want her back.”
    Beep.
    A cold, Norway-accented voice: “Hold for Her Excellency.” A pause. “On reflection, Her Excellency does not wish to speak to you. She no longer considers herself your mother. Not that she ever did, deep down.”
    Beep.
    Another voice, a woman’s, as warm and familiar as my own knuckles. “Love? You promised me. You promised.”
    Dornan got up two hours after dawn. A raft of cloud had just floated over the sun and