When it was finished, Lily ran through the bright, dry, sunlit rooms as though she had been handed a castle, and in a way, to a child who had been listening to rain come through the ceiling her whole short life, she had.

But a new fear had taken up residence in Mabel, and it was, she realized with some alarm, the opposite of the old one.

She was no longer afraid of Damian invading her life.

She was afraid of him leaving it.

“You can’t stay in this town forever, Damian,” she said one evening, after Lily was asleep.

She said it, he understood, to get ahead of the wound — to name the leaving first, so it could not surprise her the way it had before.