I spend forty minutes rehearsing how to tell my sister she mass-produced a demon.

“Margot, you know how you make candles.”

Too casual.

“Margot, sit down.”

Too grave; she’ll assume cancer.

“Margot, the candle you sent me summoned an incubus who now lives in my apartment and has a Costco membership, and you made two hundred and thirty-nine more of them and sold them at a craft fair.”

Accurate. Unusable.

“You’re moving your mouth,” Ash says from the couch.

“I’m workshopping.”

“You’ve been workshopping since ten. It’s noon.” He’s got one arm along the back of the couch and his ankle on his knee, and he is watching me pace with the specific enjoyment of a man watching weather from indoors. “Say the true thing.”

“The true thing is deranged.”

“The true thing is true, Cora, which is a different and better category—”

The buzzer goes.

“—and also, she’s here,” he says.

She’s here because I called her four hours ago and said can you come over, which in our family is a sentence that means somebody has died, and by the time I clarified nobody had died she was already in the car.

Priya comes in first, which tells me everything about the drive.

“She’s been theorizing,” Priya says, handing me a paper bag with pastries in it, because Priya is a person who brings pastries to an emergency of unknown category. “For ninety minutes. In the car. Out loud.”

“Priya.”

“I want to be clear that I asked her to stop.”

And then Margot is through the door in a linen thing the color of a life jacket, holding — of course, obviously, because the universe has a sense of humor and no restraint whatsoever — the binder.

She stops dead when she sees Ash on the couch.

“Oh good,” she says. “He’s here. That’s good. That’s — is it good?” She rounds on me. “Cora, is it good? Your voice on the phone was — you did the flat voice; you only do the flat voice when—”

“Nobody’s dead.”

“You said that, and then you asked how many candles I made, which is a bizarre follow-up to nobody’s dead—”

“Margot.” I take the binder out of her hands and set it on the table, because she’s gesturing with it and it weighs nine pounds. “Sit down.”

She sits. Priya sits beside her and takes her hand in that unbothered way she has, and Ash gets up off the couch and stands, because apparently nine hundred years produces a man who stands when there’s bad news in the room.

“Your candle worked,” I say.

“I know it worked, I’ve met him—”

“It worked in Vancouver, on a cul-de-sac, yesterday morning, in the living room of a sixty-three-year-old man named Peter whose wife died in February.”

The room goes very quiet.

“He lit one of your candles,” I say. “And Ash was standing next to me in a Costco, and then he wasn’t, because when somebody lights one he doesn’t get a choice. He goes.”

Margot doesn’t say anything. Her hand has gone still inside Priya’s.

“He was gone an hour and fifty minutes,” I say. “And he came back, and what he’d been doing was sitting in a stranger’s house being the wrong answer to a question about a dead woman.”

“Cora,” Priya says quietly.

“There are two hundred and thirty-nine more of them out there, Margot. You told me on the phone. Solstice market, Priya’s cousin, a whole flat to the craft fair in Vancouver, which is where Peter got his.” I sit down on the arm of the chair because my legs have opinions. “Every one of them is a doorbell. And he has to answer.”

I have seen my sister cry at a commercial for a bank. I have seen her cry at the end of a hockey game she had no stake in. I expected — and I am ashamed of this, in retrospect, given everything — I expected the performance. The gasp. The hand over the mouth. The whole Margot apparatus.

Instead, she goes white and completely silent, and it’s so much worse.

“Margot—”

“How many times,” she says.

“What?”

“How many times has it happened.” She’s not looking at me. She’s looking at Ash. “Since the solstice. How many times has somebody lit one of mine and pulled you somewhere.”

“Margot, he doesn’t—”

“Eleven,” says Ash.

I turn around.

“Eleven?”

“Eleven,” he says again, evenly, and I am aware of the floor being further away than it was.

“You’ve been—” I must start over. “Six weeks. You’ve been gone eleven times and I noticed once?”

“Most of them are short.” He says it like it’s comfort. “Somebody lights a candle at two in the morning because they’re lonely and they’ve had a bad night, and I’m there, and they’re asleep in twenty minutes because what they actually wanted was to not be by themselves at two in the morning, and that one’s easy, that one I can do.” He shrugs, and it isn’t casual. “You sleep hard, Cora. You’ve never once woken up.”