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As the hours passed the trees became thicker, the air cooler, the houses fewer, the voices of my children more strident.
    “Oh, my God! Where are you taking us?” Grace whined when I turned onto the main street of a classic New England town. HAWLEY VILLAGE , a white sign with stark lettering told us, FOUNDED 1741 . She flipped her red hair back. I could see it spark in the rearview mirror, bouncing like Slinkys released. The twins had my fierce curls. Their faces were identical, down to the constellations of freckles that spangled their delicate noses, but it was otherwise easy to tell them apart. Although both were just starting to come out of a Goth phase, Grace was still partial to ripped black jeans and black leather jackets, with black eye paint in swaths up to her eyebrows. Fai, less inclined to denim and makeup, wore long fringy things that made her look as if she’d stepped fresh-faced out of a fairy tale, a milkmaid in mourning. Because they always dressed in black, they’d wanted white for the funeral, white for mourning their father. Now each of them always wore something white, a scarf or a shirt. The black clothes were ceding to white, but their clothes still reflected their personalities, Grace’s sleek, Fai’s princess inspired.
    Caleigh inherited my russet coloring but Jeremy’s stick-straight hair,was solid where her sisters were lean as greyhounds. She played her usual never-ending string game, her hands busy leaping from her warm-up patterns—“Cat’s Cradle” to “Cup and Saucer”—then to the patterns of her own devising. Her patterns were now called things like “Falling Leaves” and “Maple Candy.” “Missing Dad” was still in the rotation, but she wove it a little less frequently. Maybe it was a sign this move was good for us all, even though my heart hurt when I thought how Caleigh was getting used to a world without Jeremy, how we all were.
    “Hey, look, a fair!” In spite of her concentration on the string, Caleigh didn’t miss much.
    A large wooden cutout of a pumpkin proclaimed HARVEST FESTIVAL, OCTOBER 19, 20—FOOD, FUN, MUSIC .
    “Hey, it’s next weekend! Can we go?” Caleigh was a lover of caramel apples and fried dough, like most ten-year-olds. “Mom, will you take us?”
    “I don’t want to go to some raggedy-ass fair,” Grace sniped.
    “Language, Grace.” Although I knew that far worse words than
raggedy ass
could, and did, come flying from their mouths.
    “Yeah, you didn’t hear her
language
at the hotel.”
    I sighed. “And I’d rather not hear it now, Faith.”
    “Don’t call me that. You know I hate the
thh
. It makes people spit.”
    I was almost grateful for some grumbling and crankiness, the times my daughters reminded me of their old unguarded selves. We had all been trying too hard, and I could see that Grace and Fai felt the strain of it. Fifteen is a vexing age. All fifteen-year-olds want to grow up faster than they have a right to. Without their father to brace them up, I was afraid for the twins, balanced on that cusp where a child can become a woman overnight. I wished I could wave my magic wand and make everything better. But the magic was gone from our lives, along with Jeremy.
    In a strange and horrible way, the Fetch had made us closer. My daughters could have turned away from me after Jeremy died, blamed me as I blamed myself. But now it was all of us against the Fetch, against their father’s killer. The sad truth was that not one of us was the same person we had been. Maybe fighting this battle together would get us through to some other side, where we were scarred but still ourselves, still there for each other, still a family. I could hope for that, cling to it while everythingin our lives was changing, shifting in the wind like drifts of fallen leaves in the yards of Hawley Village.
    I turned off Main Street, past the church, the row of stores that included Pizza by Earl, the Suds & Stuff Laundromat, a drugstore, and Elmer’s,