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that terrifies her so much, she quickly covers her ears, as if to dull the sound of her own screams. But she is so deeply startled that she cannot even scream—someone is in the room, curled up on the floor, covered by a pale blue blanket.
    She reaches for her phone, wishing it were a gun. She would fire it, no questions asked.
    Yet in that moment right before rising fear turns into uncontrollable panic, she sees something else. Something familiar. His hair. His hand.
    She puts the phone down.
    It’s Adam. Half an hour ago, he was standing in Alice’s bedroom with his arms angrily folded over his chest, watching with great disapproval as Alice allowed herself to be led down the staircase to the second floor. But now it seems as if he’s had a change of heart. It might be more than he can manage to stay up there on his own. Or it might be contrary to his nature to be away from his sister if he can help it. Or maybe the solace that Cynthia has offered Alice is something that Adam wants and needs too.
    Whatever motivated him, he is here. He sleeps on the floor, using his forearm as a pillow.
    It’s quite possible that this is the happiest Cynthia has ever felt in her life—and what a strange kind of happiness it is too. Not a jumping-up-and-down, fist-pumping, throwing-your-hat-up-in-the-air kind of happiness, but the kind that swells your heart and moves you to the brink of tears, a happiness that fills you like the sound of an orchestra, a happiness that reminds you that life is fragile and fleeting…
    Cynthia switches off her lamp and slips quietly out of bed. The house is still basically a strange environment, but she has at least memorized the path between her side of the bed and the bathroom, and she can confidently make the thirteen-step journey without benefit of light—with her eyes closed, in fact.
    She has also memorized the contours of the bathroom, and she lowers herself sightlessly onto the chilly toilet seat and, with a long sigh, empties her bladder.
    There is something strange about it, however, and as she pees, she furrows her brow, trying to puzzle what is different.
    The sound! Not the bright lively sound of her urine stream splashing into the water, but a dull quiet thud, like rain hitting broad, fleshy leaves. She half stands and peers into the darkness of the bowl. She gropes for the light switch, flicks it, floods the room with lumens.
    It’s a bat, a bat in the toilet, her bare bottom was inches from it, and she has peed on it. Like most people, Cynthia has uttered the three-word phrase Oh my God countless times, but now she whispers it and she has never meant it more. Pulling her underwear back up, she leans against the wall for balance, so frightened and repelled that her legs seem practically useless.
    Is it dead? Now and then, a bat used to find its way into her place back in San Francisco. The first time it happened, she called the police. It didn’t do her any good, of course, but it at least gave the guys in the precinct a laugh. The second time, she threw a coat over her head and fled the house. She had made a point of learning a few things about bats. She learned they were essentially harmless—the greatest danger they posed was bacterial, but they did not suck your blood or like to fly into your hair and scream and claw, and they did not turn into Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee or Gary Oldman or Frank Langella or any of the other gloriously creepy men who’d played Dracula. They were mice with wings. She tried to find comfort in that—but could not. This bat in her toilet had obviously been trapped there while searching for water. Bats could not lift off to fly; they needed to perch on something with a bit of height, let go, glide, and then start flapping. And so the bat (she tries to think of it as the poor thing but she is too disgusted by it to show the proper pity), unable to rise from the water, must have slowly drowned.
    There’s