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Evelyn went alone to the toolshed and began carrying armfuls of their implements back to the kitchen. Stakes, spades, forks, a pitchfork, a scythe. Their mother’s sickle was still sharp enough to fell a sapling in one go.

When she came back with the first lot of tools, Lily was with the boy by the dresser, comparing the merits of the various paintings she had made of him. Evelyn dumped the tools on the table, and Lily watched her but said nothing.

“I’ll do everything myself then, shall I?” Evelyn said. “As per usual.”

“What exactly are we meant to be doing?”

“Getting ready.”

“I think this is all a bit much, Sissie.”

“Obviously you do,” said Evelyn. “You’d rather welcome them in and give them supper and a hot bath.”

“You haven’t heard him talk about them. They’re not monsters, they’re just people.”

“You mean men.”

“And women.”

“Well, I trust him about as far as I can throw him. Men, monsters. Same difference.”

“They won’t hurt you,” the boy said, though he seemed unsure.

Evelyn squinted at him.

“They will want to look in the house, though. And they’ll probably want to take you back with them,” he said. “They’ll want to take all of us back.”

He and Lily exchanged a glance. Evelyn seemed not to recognize either of them. Their faces had changed. As if they had been impostors all along.

“They’ll do no such thing,” said Evelyn, shooing them away from the dresser. She opened the drawer where they kept the almanac, but it was not there. She reached farther in and groped about but found only splinters. She slammed the drawer shut again.

“You,” she said, pointing at her sister.

“What now?”

“You’ve taken the almanac.”

“Of course I haven’t. Why would I need to take it when I’ve got you to tell me exactly what to do all the time? Why on earth do you need it now, anyway?”

“I want to look at the map. I want to see where we can improve the wall. And we need to think about the storm. What we can cover, what we can save.”

“I don’t know where it is. You’re the only one who uses it.”

Evelyn looked at her askance and went rooting around the kitchen. She went from the table to their bedding, looking under the pillows and blankets and then opening all the kitchen cupboards.

“Well, it’s hardly going to be in there, is it,” said Lily.

Evelyn ignored her. She came back to where the boy was sitting at the table. He was examining the tools, one by one.

“Did you take it?” she said.

“No,” he said.

“Stand up.”

He stood up. She looked under where he had been sitting.

“Turn around.”

He turned around. She patted the sides of his trousers and ran her hands over his shirt, front and back.

“Has to be someone else’s fault, doesn’t it?” Lily said. “We’ve not touched your bloody almanac, Evie.”

“I think you’re lying.”

“I’m not.”

“You were lying about your ballet shoes. You were lying about sending him into the house. I’m sick of you keeping things from me.”

“That makes two of us, doesn’t it?”

Evelyn looked at her and then in the drawer again, as if by some miracle the almanac might have materialized there. She felt as if she was going mad. She had felt it all day. She looked in the smaller drawers where she kept the sunglasses and where Lily stored their mother’s jewelry.

“Well, here’s the silver lining,” said Lily. “If you’ve gone doolally, then you’re off the hook. His lot aren’t going to want to take a madwoman back with them, are they? I’ll go with them and you can stay here as long as you like. You and Mama, alone at last.”

Evelyn spat on the floor. Lily raised her eyebrows. They both looked at the little spot of saliva fizzing on the tiles, and then Evelyn turned and went out into the garden, freighted with rage and embarrassment and a bottomless, black fear.

—

She stayed out all evening. She made two laps of the entire garden to check the integrity of the wall and after each one she returned to the lawn and stood listening—for the others, for the storm—but the only sound was the wind in the dry and graying leaves.

There was a faint glow from the windup lamp in the kitchen, but she felt no inclination to go inside and get warm. Perhaps Lily and the boy were playing cards and getting drunk. Perhaps they were discussing their new life together, somewhere in the new garden, with other women and other men. With the boy’s “friend.” From time to time Evelyn would open her mouth wide, so wide her jaw hurt, and breathe in as much of the night air as she could. When she exhaled, the world seemed clearer, and she thought: let them go, Lily and the boy, let them bugger off, so she could finally enjoy the garden in peace. It wasn’t as if Lily did any work anymore, and she didn’t know the almanac the way Evelyn knew it. Evelyn would be quite able to look after the place on her own. Yes, quite capable of enduring without her sister getting under her feet and spoiling everything.

Moonlit and silent, she searched for special things that she could plant around the house to keep them safe. She found one of the cockerel’s tail feathers; a broken, empty egg from a blackbird’s nest; a stone with rings like the cross section of a tree trunk. She buried them to the south, east, and west. For the second night in a row she did not sleep, and as she wandered back to the house under a lightening sky, the garden throbbed and slanted around her. The wind had not abated, and her hair was desiccated with the dust it held.

Inside, the other two were asleep. Evelyn looked again for the almanac. She was sure that Lily or the boy had lost it, or more likely hidden it on purpose. Another trick on her sister’s part. Another game. As everything was. Stupid girl.

By the dresser she came face-to-face with the boy in Lily’s paintings. The work was good. Her sister had captured the peculiar mixture of lightness and sadness in his face. In all four of the pictures he was looking down at the ground or away to something out of the frame. Lost in thought or possibly ashamed of something. Well, so he should be, Evelyn thought. In one of the paintings he was propping himself up on one arm, and the line of his elbow seemed a little off. It wasn’t like Lily to leave mistakes in her paintings. She had nothing but time to correct them.

Evelyn looked closer. There was a second line beneath the line of his arm. This was not unusual since Lily had painted over these four pieces of paper hundreds of times, giving them the appearance of some primitive palimpsest. But the line beneath the boy was thin and precise, like a hairline fracture in the paper. And now that she thought about it, the paper did not seem as thick or dog-eared as Lily’s usual canvases. Evelyn took it from the shelf and carried it out into the thin light of the dawn. The edge and corner of a vegetable bed beneath the brushwork. A handwritten letter e , twice, where the paint was thinnest.

All her work, all Mama’s work, obliterated.

Evelyn staggered a few feet onto the gravel. She was already delirious with lack of sleep. She tasted a saltiness at the back of her mouth, and for a moment she thought she was going to be sick, but she hadn’t eaten for almost a full day so she just spat and swallowed and spat again, the paper still clenched in her fingers.

After a minute or two she went back and collected all four of the paintings. She put them back in the drawer of the dresser where they belonged. As if that went some way to correcting the fault.

She fetched a cup of water from their kitchen, found herself scooping the dregs from the plastic bucket. The boy hadn’t collected any fresh water for days. Hadn’t done anything at all. The chicken eggs were no doubt piling up in the coops. She stood and drank, watching the pair of them asleep under the table, under the pile of tools and blades that Evelyn had gathered for the siege that might or might not be coming.

Evelyn set down the cup and picked up the pair of shears. She got down on her knees next to Lily and the boy, opened the handles, and held the blades above her sister’s neck. She waited, and she wondered, listening to the maddening sound of Lily’s snoring.