The whole drive over, I had argued with myself.

Half of me was certain this was nothing — the wandering of a dying mind, a scrap of paper that meant nothing, an address that would turn out to be a wrong number or an old friend’s house or a place that had no significance at all.

That half of me wanted, badly, to turn the car around.

Because the other half had heard something in Clement’s voice that I could not explain away, a clarity and an urgency that did not belong to delirium, and that half was afraid — not that the address meant nothing, but that it meant something.

I had spent my whole life on solid ground.

I knew who I was: Cordelia, daughter of a mother who died young and a stepfather who raised me alone.