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I direct my eyes away from him, and we look at the snow together. We are so close I could extend a pinkie and touch his hand.
    “What’s behind the house?” he asks.
    There is some silence between us before I say, “The generator…”
    “Do you think…?”
    “Yeah, I do.”
    We look at each other. I have goose pimples along my arms.
    “He can refuel it,” I say. “I think that as long as we stay put, he will refill the generator. If we figure out the code and get out, we will lose power and freeze.”
    He thinks long and hard about this. It sounds right. To me, at least.
    “Why?” asks Isaac. “Why would you think that?”
    “It’s in the Bible,” I say, and then automatically flinch.
    “You’re going to have to break this one down for me, Senna,” he says, frowning. His voice is terse. He’s losing patience with me, which isn’t really fair since we are both sinking in the same ship.
    “Have you seen the picture hanging next to the door?” He nods. Of course. How could he miss it? There are seven prints hanging on the walls of this house. When you spend six weeks locked up somewhere, you spend a lot of time examining the art on the walls.
    “It’s a painting by F. Cayley. It’s supposed to be of Adam and Eve when they find out they have to leave Eden.”
    He shakes his head. “I thought it was just of two very depressed people on the beach.”
    I smile.
    “We are like the first two people,” I say.
    “Adam and Eve?” He’s already so full of disbelief I don’t even want to tell him the rest.
    I shrug. “Sure.”
    “Go on,” he says.
    “God put them in the garden and told them not to eat the forbidden fruit, remember?”
    Now it’s Isaac’s turn to shrug. “Yeah, I guess. Sunday school one-o- one.”
    “Once they were tempted and ate the fruit they were on their own, exiled from God’s provision and his protection in the place he created for them.” When Isaac doesn’t say anything, I go on. “They leave perfection and have to fend for themselves—hunt, garden, experience cold and death and childbirth.”
    I flush after the last word leaves my mouth. It was dumb of me to mention childbirth considering Daphne and their unborn baby. But Isaac doesn’t skip a beat.
    “So you’re saying,” he says, crinkling his eyebrows together, “that so long as we stay here—in the place our kidnapper provided for us—we will be safe and he will keep the heat and food coming?”
    “It’s just a wild guess, Isaac. I don’t really know.”
    “So what’s the forbidden fruit?”
    I tap my finger on the tabletop. “The keypad, maybe…”
    “This is sick,” he says. “And if one painting means that much, what else is hidden in here?”
    I don’t want to think about it. “I’ll make dinner tonight,” I say.
     
     
     
    I look out the window as I peel potatoes over the sink. And then I look down at the peelings, all piled up and gross looking. We should eat those. We will probably be starving soon, wishing we had a sliver of potato skin. I scoop up shreds and hold them in my palm, not sure what to do with them. I counted the potatoes before I chose four of the smallest ones out of the fifty-pound bag. Seventy potatoes. How long could we stretch that? And the flour, and rice and oatmeal? It seemed like a lot, but we had no idea how long we’d be imprisoned here. Imprisoned. Here.
    I eat the skins. At least they won’t go to waste that way.
    God. I am grimacing and gagging on my potato skin when I drop the potato I’m holding into the sink and press the heel of my hand to my forehead. I have to focus. Stay positive. I can’t let myself sink into that dark place. My therapist tried to teach me techniques to cope with emotional overload. Why hadn’t I listened? I remember something about a garden … walking through it and touching flowers. Was that what she’d said? I try to picture the garden now, but all I see are the shadows that the trees make and the possibility that someone