Old-fashioned coffee makers can be programmed, and that means I awaken to my favorite scent.

As I turn over in Alice’s guest bed, I inhale, breathing deeply from the pillow where Silas rested last night.

Coffee is now my number two scent.

He had to go back to his assigned guest room. Decorum is in place for a reason. I understand, but at the same time I miss him. How quickly I’ve grown accustomed to having him in bed, naked, his presence a reminder that I’m a human being and not a scourge.

Birdsong fills the air outside my window. Sunlight streams into the white-walled room, making it feel bright, like I imagine heaven to be. I take a moment to inventory my body. Being in my head is easy.

Staying connected to all of the pieces of me that move me through time and space is much harder.

Drew’s team is hired to protect my body. No one helps me to protect my mind, heart, or soul. It’s not Silas’s job, but then again, sleeping with me isn’t exactly in his employee manual, either.

My phone says it’s nearly 10 a.m., which means Silas should be up by now, surely. I let myself stretch slowly. Last night was remarkable.

It takes time to settle into the crevices of my skin.

The room is so quiet.

Peace comes to us in many forms. Visual peace means clean lines and harmonious light. Tactile peace means freedom from unwanted touch. Auditory peace usually means silence.

In the naked silence I find a serenity.

And a strange, foreboding fear.

As I stay in bed, on my back, I look up at the white ceiling, the light coming in just so, turning the room into a warm asylum, far from the madding crowd of amateur shame artists. It’s an art–it truly is–to find and exploit the soft spots in people online.

As I sit up, I smell him. Smell us. The sheets are thick with the musk of desire fulfilled. It’s a pleasant scent, so private. So hidden. You have to be one of the participants to savor it, to let it inhabit you and turn scent into memory.

Conjurers and wise women know that kind of emotional alchemy.

So, too, do we now.

All the day’s insults and injuries float through my head as I stand, assaulting me with thoughts of the outside world and the calamities brewing and exploding in a whirlwind around me. This reprieve has been wonderful.

But reality means Mandy’s death is a press event, and I’m at the heart of it.

This is the tragedy: Mandy’s death.

There is a secondary tragedy, too: that I cannot properly mourn her. Or Tara. Or my mother.

I’m given no time to weep. All I’m allowed to do is deny. Run. Submit.

Silas has given me another space. A space we create, where I have more choices.

I choose him.

I dress quickly, quietly, eager to get a morning cup of coffee and to sit in the playful light with Alice. The hallway is dimly lit, an interior corridor untouched by natural light. As I walk into the big, open studio, I find myself smiling.

Twenty minutes later, I’ve had two cups of coffee and all the solitude I want. Craving interaction, I peek outside. A dusty wind blows in the space between the studio and the main house. Shutting the door, I pad around to the bedrooms, wondering where Silas and Alice might be.

As I walk past my guest bedroom, I hear my phone buzz. When I reach it, a text from Silas simply says: In the main house. Duff’s outside the door facing west. Will be back soon.

Well, there’s one answer. What about Alice?

She’s not one to sleep in so late. Her bedroom is next to mine in the guest wing. I softly rap on her door.

No answer.

The front door opens, a woman’s voice humming softly under her breath, a jaunty tune with a beautiful, low melody. A person could dance to that song. My hand is on Alice’s doorknob but I release it and walk toward the kitchen, nearly colliding with the housekeeper, Delia, who holds her hand over her heart and gives me a wide-eyed stare.

“Oh! Ms. Borokov. Sorry,” she says, the humming stopped abruptly. She’s all business. I wonder if she’s an undercover agent, pretending to clean. “I didn’t know you were still here.”

I smile at her. “Am I supposed to be gone?”

“No, ma’am.” Her pinched face makes it clear she wishes I would leave. “Just that Miss Alice didn’t call for lunch to be made, so the staff assumed y’all were gone off somewhere.”

I frown and look at Alice’s door again.

As Delia walks past me and goes into the room where Silas slept last night, humming again as I hear the sound of fabric being fluffed, I reach for Alice’s doorknob.

Tap tap tap.

Trepidation sets in like gravity, a deep and heavy burden I take on because I truly cannot turn away. Turning the knob, I tell myself I’m being silly. I tell myself Alice is fine. I tell myself all sorts of fantastical things because in the end, I know.

I just know.

She’s in bed, the sheets peaking at the fine edges of her bones, her head tilted to the right, mouth open just enough to see the lines of her teeth.

And the sheet does not move up and down with the steady breath of the living.

“Oh, Alice,” I say, the words coming out in a long, mournful sigh, her name a whisper on a spirit’s wind. Peace may come in silence, but death does, too.

And death, unlike peace, is merciless.

I don’t have to touch her to know. I don’t.

But I have to touch her for another reason.

Love.

Her hand is cold but still soft, the gnarled knuckles a roadmap of a long life. They hold the history of so many adventures. The synovial fluid stores memories of paintings, Alice’s heart spilled out onto the canvas and smeared with a brush made of vision and art. Her mouth is open slightly, the skin of her face slack. Death looks safe on her. Alice wasn’t a safe woman. Risk personified, she would have hated knowing she looked so restful, so serene.

I’m crying before I realize it, my hand clinging to the dry, papery surface of her palm. We’re programmed to expect other human beings’ bodies to act in specific ways when triggered. A dead body cannot react. Maybe that’s the very definition of death: the inability to respond. Perhaps ghosts are just dead people who can’t let go of action and reaction. Who still harbor impulses to follow the laws of physics.

All of these thoughts race through me as tears run freely down my face, onto my shirt, one perfect wet circle landing on Alice’s vein-covered hand.

“Alice,” I whisper, hoping that whatever part of her lingers in the room can hear me. If I can only make her know how important she is to me. If I can somehow reach her in this in-between, then I can let her go. I don’t want to. Her love has been such a touchstone these last few weeks.

The problem with death is that all agency is stripped away. You truly have no choice.

“Alice, thank you.” I lift her hand and kiss it, my lips wet from my own salty tears, her skin cold. “Thank you for teaching me how to look inward. Thank you for teaching me where to find beauty. Thank you for showing me love when the world just wanted to plant hate inside me.”

Footsteps grow louder until I hear them right behind me, a tiny scream making it clear that it’s a woman behind me.

“What happened? What did you do?”

I turn around to find Alice’s housekeeper holding a set of bedsheets, all neatly folded, in her arms.

And then she turns her head toward the main house and starts shrieking: “HELP! HELP! SHE KILLED MISS ALICE!”