My neck aches to turn toward Rue, to promise her that this is in the past, nothing for her to worry about. I keep my smile pasted to my face, my eyes glued to Regina.

Her chin is quivering. “It got back to you, didn’t it? They made you pay, didn’t they? I’m so sorry, Joan. Can I ever make it up to you?”

“I’m going to the grocery store with my friend Rue,” I say. “We could use a ride home. We need a lot of food, grilling charcoal, and fluid. Can you help us?”

She laughs in disbelief. I keep staring at her. Finally, she shakes her head. “Fine. I’ll grab my car and pull it up in front of Wally’s.”

When Rue and I exit the grocery store twenty minutes later, the bagger following us, wheeling out a dozen boxes of chocolate pudding, eight pints of cream, four tubs of Cool Whip, all the steak in their meat department, two bags of charcoal, and a box of lighter fluid, she’s parked at the curb, waiting.

Regina’s eyes widen when the groceries are loaded in her back seat and trunk.

“I’ve never grilled before,” I say defensively. “I don’t know how many people will be over. I want to be prepared.”

Her car’s rear drops as the last bag is packed in, but she doesn’t say anything. I slide next to her, Rue in the back.

“Thank you,” I say when she takes off.

She lights a cigarette. “You want to drive straight to your house?”

She snaps open the ashtray. I think I see a flash of white enamel etched with red inside, the color of a Mother’s pin, and my flesh erupts in gooseflesh. I reach for it, frozen but for my hand.

It’s the ripped edge of a Marlboro box.

My breathing returns to normal.

“Do you want one?” she asks, opening her purse between us to indicate her cigarettes.

I shake my head, toss Rue a reassuring smile.

She looks distressed in the back seat.

“Hey,” Regina says, low and quiet. Her tone is different. For a second, I can almost hear her dimples in it. “It’s a wide world, you know. We could go anywhere. Just keep driving. I have five hundred dollars in tips saved up, hidden beneath the spare tire. That’s enough to get us far away.”

If she’s smart—and I think she is—she’ll be one of us soon.

“I want to go straight home,” I say, turning again to flash Rue a reassuring smile.

Regina continues to smoke as she drives away from the store. Now she’s the quiet one. She pulls up to my house, still silent. She stabs out her cigarette.

“Can you wait here while Rue and I go get help?” I ask.

I locate Deck inside the house where I used to live. We are not technically together anymore. It’s awkward to be alone in a room with him, this man whose baby I carry, who I slept curled next to for many nights, who I envisioned growing old with. He’s a handsome stranger.

“Hello,” I say. “Can you help Rue and me unload groceries for the party? For when the baby’s born?”

He follows us to the car. “Holy shit!” he says when he sees everything I’ve bought. “Did you leave anything in the store? There’s enough supplies here for a hundred barbecues.”

I duck my head. “I’ve never grilled before,” I say.

Regina stays in her car, smoking.

It takes Deck four trips to unload everything.

I have overcome the second hurdle.

CHAPTER 63

I know it’s not a baby shower they’re inviting me to.

It is their final test. If I pass it, I am free, finally and forever one of them, the watcher, not the watched. I only have to survive this one final test. We pull up in front of the nursing home, me squeezed in the back seat between Dorothy, my “mother,” and Barbara, my baby’s grandmother.

My baby.

I can feel it pushing, swirling, turning.

Insisting.

My stomach looks like something is constantly wrestling inside it. If the baby comes early, I am ready. My plan is in place.

We step out of the car. The cicadas are burring and buzzing, a hypnotic whirr that blends with the kiln-heat of the air. The Mothers are pulling me into the nursing home, Mildred putting her finger over her mouth (sssshhhhh) and giggling as we pass the nurse in the reception area. They are leading me toward a door, and it feels like it might actually be a surprise party until they open it and I see the stairs leading down and too late I remember Rosamund Grant’s warning when I came here to ask what she knew about Paulie Aandeg.

Whatever you do, don’t wander into the basement.

We step down the stairs.

The smell reaches me first. I think it’s the stench of an animal farm—close bodies, waste—but realize there’s something human about it, the smell of meat eaters, of bipeds, of creatures whose clothes are washed sometimes but not often enough.

Then Catherine opens the basement door, her eyes cutting into me, lips pulled back from sharp, strong teeth in an approximation of a smile.

She steps back.

A scream freezes in my mouth.

A dozen people, maybe more, stand inside, each of them terribly deformed, all with the same pin heads and jutting jaws. Some have stumps for arms, nubs of flesh where ears should be, appendages where there should be none.

I recognize the woman from the furniture store, the feral thing with the melting eyes. Mildred walks over to her, tentatively. When she stands behind her, the woman snarls, the sound matched by the two women next to her. They all have the eyes sliding down their faces.

Mildred’s three daughters.

The scream breaks free, but it’s a sob.

I know what I’m looking at. The cursed full-blood children of Lilydale, doomed to live these half lives because of their parents’ commitment to a pure bloodline.

My half siblings.

Dorothy hovers near the door, her hands clasped in front of her. Does she not have children in this basement? Can she not produce even this?

I notice the cots rimming the edges and realize Lilydale’s children must live and die in this facility, away from the questioning eyes of the world. Catherine is walking toward the shadowed edge of the cafeteria-size room, her steps mincing, as if she’s approaching a caged lion.

That’s when I spot him.

A hulking, shirtless man. He’s staring at me. His lips are belligerent, but his face disappears just beneath them, perched on a neck that’s impossibly wider than his head. What he’s missing in chin he makes up for in a slender, towering cranium speckled with bristly hair more animal than human. His ears stick out nearly as far as his sloping shoulders.

“Joan,” Catherine says, inching closer to the behemoth lurking in the shadows, not taking her eyes off him. “I’d like you to meet my son. Quill Brody. All the children like to escape, but none of them are as good at it as my boy.”

Is that a note of pride in her voice?

“Clan will take him home on occasion, for short visits, if he’s good. Isn’t that right, Quill?” The man makes no indication he’s heard. “Sometimes on those visits, he likes to get out and visit the neighborhood houses—play in the alleys, mess with the garbage, open and close windows. Maybe you’ve seen him? Clan covers for his son, as any father would.”

She’s abreast of him. Slowly, she steps back so she can face me while keeping an eye on him.