"Bon appetit."

With a shaking hand, Gillian lifted the heavy silver fork. She sliced into the cake.

It was white cake with white frosting because Mason had told her that was his sister's favorite.

She raised the fork to her mouth. The bite of cake quivered there, just beyond her lips. She inhaled. The scent of embalming fluid filled her nostrils.

She dropped her fork with a clatter of metal on china and pushed from the table, getting to her feet and spinning around, her back to Mason and his dead sister. She gripped the edge of the sink, wondering if she was going to throw up, wondering if she had anything to throw up.

Had he killed her?

The question was caught in a loop in her head.

Had he killed her and preserved her to bring her out on special occasions? Did he have other bodies around? Was the fucking house full of bodies?

As she stood there, her mind reached a saturation point. A removed, out-of-body feeling came over her.

So what if she's dead?

What is death anyway?

Was the body sitting there any different from a leaf that had fallen from a tree and blown into the house?

Any different from a dry, faded flower? Any different from her own body, except that her own body had blood pumping through it?

"Aren't you going to join us?" Mason asked.

She could tell he was angry, but didn't want to show it in front of his sister. Which meant his sister, dead though she was, might still prove Gillian's ally.

Gillian turned around, her hands clenched together. She forced herself to look at the woman.

Not that bad, she told herself now that the initial shock was over.

Her hair, her light blond hair, shimmered softly in the candlelight. Just an empty vessel that had once held life, she told herself. "Your sister is beautiful," she whispered to Mason.

He nodded. Without getting up, he reached for Gillian, taking her hand, leading her in a semicircle back to her chair, where she sat down, lifted her fork, and took a bite of cake.

Outside, in the distance, she heard the sound of car tires moving over gravel. Mason jumped to his feet and ran to a living room window. A second later he was flying around the kitchen, blowing out candles.

Chapter 32

The true story of Josephine Von Bryant's life was one Mason cherished every bit as much as his adored fiction. One of his favorite ways to pass the time was to listen to his sister's tales.

"Start when you were ten years old," he used to beg her, because that was when she really began the search for her true self.

At ten, Josephine decided she wanted to dedicate her life to God. Their parents found her devotion frightening, so obsessed was she with living a humble existence. At one point, she shaved her head and slept on the hard floor. She starved herself, and when she couldn't find any stores that carried the hair shirts she'd heard and read about in catechism class, she bought a wool sweater from the church's store for the poor and wore it against her bare skin through summer and winter until her mother stripped it from her and burned it.

Her obsession with faith worried her parents so much that they removed her from Catholic school and put her in a private, all-girls institution. At first the other students made fun of her, calling her a freak to her face, but then she began developing signs of stigmata. The first spot started out as a blister on her palm. A week later, on the opposite side of her hand, blood began to ooze. Her classmates were fascinated, and soon Josephine had a group of faithful followers who couldn't get enough of her biblical stories of lust, suffering, and devotion.

Even though she scratched herself until she bled and kept the wounds from healing by continually picking and stabbing at them, Josephine convinced herself they were real.

By the time Josephine hit puberty, she'd grown bored with religion. Her psychologist helped her to realize it wasn't religion that had brought about her obsession with living a cloistered life, but a fear of men. She had no childhood memories of suffering at the hands of any man, so she could only guess that her fear was genetic. She became a lesbian for a while, but grew tired of that even more quickly than religion.

When their parents died unexpectedly, leaving Mason in her care, she suddenly found a new calling.

Mason.

She adored him.

Nine-year-old Mason came into her charge at a vulnerable time. He would watch her as she moved about a room, never letting his eyes waver, afraid she might leave and not come back. He would follow her to the bathroom and wait outside the door, sometimes curling up on the floor while she bathed.

Jo got a job with a traveling acting troupe, but after two years decided it wasn't the life for Mason. When an uncle died, leaving them an estate in Minnesota, they moved into the farmhouse a week after the paperwork was finished.

"This is it," Josephine said, standing in the front yard, looking up at the two-story house. "Our home."

Jo threw herself into their new life with the same enthusiasm she'd shown for religion, but no matter how hard she tried, she often lamented that it never seemed quite real to her.

Sometimes as she moved through her day, washing clothes, hanging them on the line to dry, baking pies, canning vegetables, she said she felt that she was living someone else's life. Not a bad life, by any means, she'd told Mason. Just not her life.

Was there a lack of sincerity in the way she approached things? she'd asked her brother. How did a person know when she had it right? She thought she had it right when she shaved her head and wore a wool sweater. Now she looked back on those days with embarrassment. She thought she had it right when she decided to become a lesbian. She and her partner went to gatherings where they spoke up for women's rights. She never wore a dress and didn't take any shit from anyone, especially a man.

But that had all been playing at life, experimenting and experiencing what it meant to be human. It hadn't been who she was.

Then she was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

This, she told Mason. This is real.

Their last year together was spent reading a translation of the entire seven-volume set of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, because that was something Jo had always promised herself she would do. They spent evenings listening to music and just talking quietly.

But there came a time when Jo was much too blunt, when she came right out and told Mason that she wouldn't always be there for him, that she would be leaving one day and he would never see her again. They had to make plans.

Her biggest concern was that he'd be lonely. "You need to meet girls," she would say to him as she lay in bed at night with Mason in a chair nearby. "When I'm gone, you need to get busy. Find someone. There's somebody out there for you. Somebody who will love and adore you. But you won't find her here, sitting at home or piddling around with your roses. You've got to go out and find her. Promise me you'll do that? Promise me you won't just hide here, being sad?"

He wouldn't listen. Anytime she brought up the subject of her impending death, he shut out her blunt and awful words. "We can move," he told her. "We can go somewhere else. I know you've never liked it here. I know those women in town have been mean to you."

"Moving won't change anything," she said sadly. "Mason, I'm dying."

He refused to believe her. He was twenty-seven, but he reverted back to his childhood.

Jo enlisted the help of a hospice, but they knew only about death; they didn't know about helping the living. She contacted the local church. It wasn't Catholic, but she didn't think that mattered. The minister came to visit. Mason kicked him out, telling him to get the hell off their property.