“Well,” Katie said awkwardly, and in that awkwardness she felt as though a door was closing somewhere, walling off everything that had come before, all of the times they had snuck away from their parents and decided to run away, the forts they had built in each other’s backyards, the times Row had helped her with her maths homework, all the way back to that day against the wall of the schoolhouse when Row had smoothed a hand over her aching scalp and made her forget that someone had been cruel. The door closed, deep in her mind, with a hollow boom that Katie heard rather than felt, and when
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