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"Who lives here?"

"Nobody. Judah kept it for me." A laugh escapes me, and it hurts. "He told the parish it was a memorial."

She backs the truck to the porch, hauls the hose off the reel, and drags it up the steps. I get out, because I can't stay in the cab, and follow her in with one hand braced along the wall.

Nothing has been moved. The iron bed in the back room. The dresser with its mirror. The kitchen table with its single chair. He's preserved it the way you'd preserve a dead son's bedroom.

"Here," I tell her, and she opens the nozzle.

Gasoline floods across the floor where I slept for years, soaking the rag rug and running under the iron bed, and the fumes rise so thick my eyes stream. I point, and she follows: the kitchen, the closet where he hung my good clothes for funerals, the back room where he carved the first word into my chest with a straight razor on my fifteenth birthday while my mother's picture watched from the dresser.

I pick up the picture. It's a small one in a tin frame, a girl of maybe seventeen with dark hair and a crooked smile, squinting into the sun in front of a strawberry field. I have no idea who took it or how it survived. I slide it inside my shirt against my skin. Evie sees me do it and says nothing.

She soaks the dresser, and we leave.

We enter the big house through the kitchen door, the way I came in every morning of my life for breakfast. It smells as it always did, of old wood and furniture wax and, underneath, the sweetness of the magnolias outside the dining room. I lead her through it with the hose unspooling down the long center hall behind us.

"He sat at the head of that table," I tell her in the dining room. "I sat at the foot by the kitchen door, with the children."

The fuel runs across the tablecloth and drips from the chair seats.

"They laid my mother out in the front parlor. I was four. I remember pennies on her eyes."

She drenches the carpet.

I stop in the doorway of the study and lean on the frame. The dark roll top still stands by the window with its brass lamp and leather chair. The bottom drawer hangs open and empty.

"That's where I found the book."

She turns the hose on the desk.

The staircase next. The upstairs gallery. The bedroom at the end of the hall that was the old man's and must be Judah's now, the bed unmade, a pistol on the nightstand, a Bible lying open face down on the pillow. The tank gurgles lower with every room.

At the end of it, the chapel.

It's a small room off the back gallery, hardly larger than a closet, with four chairs, a wooden kneeler, and a stained-glass window of the Good Shepherd with a lamb across his shoulders. An old wooden record player sits on a table in the corner, the same kind that was turning in Harlowe Chapel tonight. In front of the kneeler, a stain has soaked into the floorboards so deep that no sanding has ever lifted it.

"Is that it?" Evie asks quietly.

"That's it."

Six years ago I let the old man bleed out on those boards with his hymn still playing, and I sat in one of those four chairs and watched. I believed it would be enough. I believed I'd walk out of this house into the swamp and be finished.

She studies the stain a long moment, then floods the room.

Out in the pecan grove, the hose empty behind us, she takes a book of matches from the glovebox and holds it out.

I strike one. I look up at the house pale against the dark, with its columns and galleries and all its rooms, the only home I've ever had, and I throw the match onto the soaked porch steps.

It goes up with a sound like an enormous indrawn breath. Fire races up the steps, across the gallery, and through the open door, and within half a minute every downstairs window glows orange, then the upstairs, then the cottage behind it, bright and sudden, as though someone flipped on every light at once.

We stand and watch it burn.

I wait to feel something. What comes is exhaustion, a great weight settling over me from the crown of my head down, and beneath it something quiet I have no name for, which might be relief.

Her fingers slide into mine. "Town next."

"Town," I agree.