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earnest.
    “Stop it!” said Ivy. “Stop it! I don’t want to hear any more about it! Save it for when Sammy gets home, okay?”
    “Okay,” he said, the corners of his mouth stiff and straight. He slipped past her.
    Ivy began to examine the boards and could hear her brother sweeping the tree house behind her. Then the broom stopped. She glanced over her shoulder. Philip’s face was happy and bright again. He still clutched the broom, but he was standing on his tiptoes, stretching upward. “Thank you,” he mouthed silently.

4

    That evening Ivy wandered from room to room in the house, feeling restless and edgy. She didn’t want to go out or call up a friend, but she could find nothing to do at home. Each time she heard the clock chime in the dining room, she couldn’t stop her mind from turning back to the night Tristan died.
    When Maggie and Andrew went to bed, Ivy went up to her room to read. She wished that Gregory were home. In the last few weeks they had watched a lot of late-night TV together, sitting quietly side by side, sharing cookies, laughing at the dumb jokes. She wondered where he was now. Maybe he had helped Eric clean up after the party, then the two of them had gone out. Or maybe he had gone to Suzanne’s. She could call Suzanne and say—Ivy caught herself before that thought went any further. What was she thinking? Call up Suzanne in the middle of a date?
    I depend on Gregory way too much, Ivy thought.
    She crept downstairs and took a flashlight from the kitchen drawer. Maybe a walk would make her sleepy; maybe it would get rid of that prickling feeling in the back of her mind. When Ivy opened the back door, she saw Gregory’s BMW parked outside the garage. He must have brought back the car at some point and taken off again. She wished he were there to walk with her.
    The driveway, a continuous curve down the side of the ridge, was three quarters of a mile long. Ivy walked it to the bottom. After the steep climb back, her body finally felt tired, but her mind was still awake and as restless as the tossing trees. It was as if there was something she had to remember, and she couldn’t sleep until she remembered it—but she had no idea what it was.
    When she arrived back at the house, the wind had changed and a sharp, wet smell swept over the ridge. In the west, lightning flashed, casting up images of clouds like towering mountains. Ivy longed for a storm with bright lightning and wind to release whatever it was that was pent up inside her.
    At one-thirty she climbed into bed. The storm had skirted their side of the river, but there were more flashes in the west. Maybe they would get the next big gust of rain and wind.
    At two o’clock she was still awake. She heard the long whistle of the late-night train as it crossed the bridge and rushed on through the little station far below the house. “Take me with you,” she whispered. “Take me with you.”
    Her mind drifted after the lonely sound of the whistle, and Ivy felt herself slipping away, rocked by the low rumbling of thunder in the distant hills.
    Then the rumbling became louder, louder and closer. Lightning quivered. The wind gusted up, and the trees that had been slowly swaying from side to side now lashed themselves with soaked branches. Ivy peered out through the storm. She could hardly see, but she knew something was wrong. She opened a door.
    “Who is it?” she cried out. “Who’s there?”
    She was outside now, struggling against the wind and moving toward a window, with lightning streaking all around her. The window was alive with reflections and shadows. She could barely make out the figure on the other side, but she knew something or someone was there, and the figure seemed familiar to her.
    “Who is it?” she called out again, moving closer and closer to the window.
    She had done this before, she knew she had, sometime, somewhere, perhaps in a dream, she thought. A feeling of dread washed over her.
    She was in a dream,