Eleven years ago, Maya had been fifteen, and the girl who lived in that house had been her best friend.

 Her name was Josephine Ellery, and she went by Jo, and she had a way of tilting her head when she was about to say something true that made Maya, even now, brace herself a little at the memory. Jo had lived in that house with her father, who worked nights at the freight yard, and the two of them, Maya and Jo, had spent that last summer doing what teenagers in small towns do — nothing, mostly, but nothing that felt, at the time, like everything. 

The week before Jo disappeared, they’d sat on the roof outside Jo’s bedroom window — the same window, Maya realized now, climbing the porch steps — passing a bag of sour candy back and forth and talking about the future the way you do when you don’t yet understand that it can go wrong.

 “When I come back,” Jo had said, out of nowhere, watching the stars, “I want you to still be here. Promise me you’ll still be here.” 

“Come back from where?”

 “I don’t know yet. Somewhere.” Jo had smiled the way she did when she was hiding something, not unkindly, just privately. “But I’ll leave the light on. So you know I’m not really gone.” 

Maya, fifteen and certain that nothing important could actually happen to her or the people she loved, had laughed and promised, the way you promise things you don’t yet know how to keep. 

Three weeks later, Jo and her father were gone. No note, no warning, no explanation the town ever settled on. Some people said debt. Some people said her father had done something and run. Some people, cruelly, said other things. Maya had never believed any of it, mostly because believing anything meant admitting Jo wasn’t coming back, and she had promised.

 The light came on for the first time nine days after they left. It had never stopped.