“Just let me out here.”

I look up from my phone; I’m exactly where it says I should be. A glance out the window confirms it. The cab driver peers at the road and asks, “You sure? It’s a long way up.”

I dig his fare from my pocket and pass it over the seat.

He frowns as he takes it and says, “I can get you closer.”

“It’s fine.”

I let myself out. A few fat snowflakes drift from the sky as I shove my hands in my pockets and begin the trek down the dirt road stretched in front of me. The cab pulls back onto the highway and I listen to the rush of its wheels as it drives away until it’s gone and I’m alone.

The Garrett property looks different without the tent commanding its landscape and all the cars parked haphazardly nearby, without its desperate crowd of revelers. But there’s still the ghost of that energy here, as if awaiting its next holy moment.

The ground is hard beneath my feet, the air painfully bitter. I try to steel myself against it, but I can’t. My mended bones make themselves known in bad weather, in the cold. They feel like a bruise wrapped around a toothache. Patty had so many years on me, but my body had so much wear on hers, so many more weaknesses. In that way, I was the elder between us. I hunch my shoulders and push forward, trying to ignore my churning gut. The house is at the farthest end of the farm and by the time I reach its edges, the beds of my fingernails are purple.

It’s a nostalgic-looking two-story with white siding and stormy blue accents. The kind of place that’s known many generations. It’s mostly well-kept, but there are parts of it that seem weathered just enough to keep it humble or at least maintain the illusion of humility. Jesus was born in a stable, after all. The front porch has a battered screen door blocking the hefty wooden door behind it and a raggedy wicker chair sits under a picture window, its curtains drawn.

The narrow path up is dug from the earth, flat stones pressed into it. I’ve just put my foot on the first one when the bulky front door opens slowly, a struggle very apparent in the tiny hands grasping its edges and forcing it open. The screen door is a much easier conquest. It swings out with a whine of protest, and then a little girl comes flying from the house before disappearing around the back. She doesn’t notice me. I only really register her after she’s gone, repeating the scene in my mind’s eye to take it in. She was very small, with brown hair tied into a sloppy ponytail, a puffy yellow jacket, and garish pink boots. There and gone. I wonder if this is some kind of jailbreak, if I should follow the motion blur of her to be sure …

I turn back to the house.

She left the main door open, a black hole past the screen. I make my way up, my eyes locked on the darkness until they slowly adjust to a form: the subtle curve of person holding themselves back, keeping to the shadows. Watching me. I still and watch back, my palms tingling, neck prickling, my whole body responding to the question my mind is too afraid to ask. I swallow, wondering if she would deny me now, here, like this.

My breath catches in my throat as the screen door opens.

But it’s not her.

It’s Foster. He steps onto the porch, taking me in as I take him in. He’s wearing scuffed-up jeans and a plaid winter jacket, less the security guard he was the last time I saw him, though it doesn’t make him less imposing.

He says, “You shouldn’t be here.”

“You shouldn’t be breaking into my office.”

It catches him off guard, enough to stop his journey to me, but only momentarily. I shiver, the fury that drove me here diminishing in this wide-open space and suddenly, that question I asked Dana when I came to the sermon hangs in the air.

Are Foster and Amalia armed?

“Casey says The Project has nothing to hide,” I say. My voice falters as he gets closer.

“We don’t.”

I raise my chin.

“You sure act like people with something to hide.”

He stops just in front of me and then I take a step forward, bridging that last inch between us, daring him with my whole body, using it to tell him I’m not afraid, even if I am.

“I want to talk to Bea.”

“Turn around,” he says, “and go back to your life.”

“No.”

“Get out of here and leave us be.”

“Where the fuck is my sister?”

“You need to leave before something happens.”

My pulse thrums at his threat and the sheer hubris of my utter refusal to accept it.

At the way he’s looking at me.

At the sound of the screen door opening slowly behind us, and the soft, new voice that follows—

And says my name.