After Karen “died,” the Moon Shade house was rebuilt quickly.
It was bigger, brighter, and looked exactly like a showpiece estate from a glossy magazine.
But for Henry’s family and for Charles, there was only one thing in that entire place that felt real—
the coffin in the basement. The coffin that held a burned, unrecognizable body.
They all knew that body might not actually be Karen. But none of them dared to be the first to say it out loud.
They were all clinging to the same, terrible thought: what if she really was dead?
Lisa went down to the ice coffin every single day. She changed the corpse’s dress, smoothed the scorched strands of hair, fussed over her like she was still a sleeping daughter.
She had never believed in prophets or seers before, but now she had almost emptied t
