My parents told me to empty my farmhouse for their forty anniversary guests. I said my daughter was eleven days out of a bone-marrow transplant. Mum said: “Lock her upstairs.” I agreed — and on Saturday the sheriff was waiting at my gate.

do the work for her, the way it always has.

She said: you’re embarrassing yourself. Open the gate.

I said: no.

She put both hands on the bars and started on the speech — family property, ungrateful daughter, everything we have done for you — and Sheriff Doss asked her, politely, to step back from the gate.

Instead she reached through and punched in the code she had used for years.

It beeped twice and did nothing.

She did it again. Slower. As though the keypad had misheard her.

Then I saw movement upstairs.

Nessa was at her bedroom window, holding the edge of the curtain. Pale, in her mask.

My mother looked up at her.

And then she turned to the sheriff, and she raised her voice, and she said:

See? She’s already upstairs. There’s no problem.

Even Sheriff Doss stopped talking.

I stood on my own porch and looked at