She hadn’t told Marnie. She’d barely told herself. She was waiting for the right moment.

She wondered about Daniel most often. She didn’t know whether to think about him as alive or dead, but she thought about him anyway. Inside her head, he was the one she could talk to.

She felt as though she understood his solitude better. She understood it so well that she felt as though she had caught it from him like a fever. Well, first she’d caught his craziness; the solitude came more slowly. When you knew you were different, when your interior world didn’t make sense to anyone, including you, it naturally set you apart. You couldn’t keep track of what normal people were supposed to think versus what you actually thought, and the gap between them widened. The simplest interactions were a little more strained, until maybe you gave up on most of them.

I think this might be called “mental illness,” she said to herself on a few low occasions. But maybe I am on to something true, she would argue to herself. Maybe a lot of crazy people are on to something true, her self would argue back.

She’d long ago called it quits on finding a rational explanation. She was searching for the irrational explanation that best fit with all the things she had experienced. Internal consistency was as good as she was hoping for.

Some people thought you could access previous lives through hypnosis. Past-life regression, it was called. Of course, that meant accepting the premise that you had past lives, which was big, but she was putting that aside for the moment. She was accepting it in a probationary way, for the sake of conjecture. Conjecture was, after all, her constant companion, her new BFF.

So that would mean the English girl was her, Lucy, in a previous life. That, indeed, was a big one to swallow, but there it was. That would mean the enormous house really existed or had existed somewhere, presumably in England. That would mean she’d once had a mother who’d made gardens and died when she was young. That would mean that there had been a real boy she had loved who had died, whom she had called Daniel, whom she considered in her dreams to be the same person as her Daniel from high school.

That would mean there really was, or had been, a note left for . . . well, for her. That would mean there were these things in the real world and that she could, presumably, find them if they had not been lost or destroyed. It felt like quite a leap to connect these pictures in her mind to real things in the world, but that was what her hypothesis demanded. She wanted to find out. She couldn’t let it go until she did. She was going to keep chasing her craziness; she wasn’t going to let it chase her. If there was a real place and a house and a note, she was going to try to find them.

Her summer break really was turning out to be a vacation after all—a vacation from sanity. She thought fleetingly of Dana. She hoped she could make a safe trip back at the end of it.