“I don’t know!” My voice was too loud. “I don’t know,” I repeated at a much more intimate level. “You tell me! Am I insane? Was I in a hospital? Mental clinic?” Speaking my worst doubts aloud wasn’t the good therapy I’d hoped it might be. Every word made me tremble in fear, not because I felt silly saying them, but because I worried they might turn out to be true. And wouldn’t that be a damned shame? But no, he was shaking his head. “Did I fall? Did I hit my head? Am I crazy?”

“No. It’s not like that at all.”

“But you don’t think I’m crazy, right?”

“No.”

The relief I felt was even greater than the night before, when I’d remembered the Niagara Falls trip. All it had taken had been one word. “So what, I have to play twenty questions to get some answers from you? Am I bigger than a breadbox?” He smiled a little bit at that quip. So the milkman wasn’t impervious to a little banter. Good. That made me feel more at ease, somehow. “Is my name even Samantha Jones?”

“I don’t know,” was all he said.

“But I’m not her?” I asked, feeling as if I was on to something. As luck would have it, right at that moment I heard the percussive rap of the McCuddy’s front screen door. My hand flew up to my mouth, preventing it from saying anything more. My milkman’s eyebrows furrowed together at the noise, erasing for a moment the scar from view. The confirmation in his eyes said everything I needed to know. “I’m not Mrs. Goody-goody Jones,” I repeated, certain of the fact as I was of . . . well, I hadn’t been certain of much lately, but of this, I was. I dredged a memory from some dark corner of my mind. “Am I in the witness protection program? No, that doesn’t make sense, if I don’t have an identity to protect.”

“It’s difficult to explain.” I understood he was trying to be discreet, but I needed an answer. I deserved some kind of answer, and I couldn’t wait another twenty-four hours to get it. He rubbed a hand over his face, scraping a layer of bristles that had already grown in over the day’s shave. “You’d call this place a construct. It’s made to look like it’s real, but it’s a self-contained bubble. For these kin who made it, it’s like a toy.”

“I’m in a toy?” I whispered, appalled. And, to be honest, a little offended. The last thing anyone wanted to be told was that they’d been stuffed into some kind of overblown version of Timothy and Patrick’s Fisher-Price school bus made by someone’s crazy family. Common sense told me I shouldn’t be paying a bit of attention to the nonsense spewing from his mouth, but I’d abandoned common sense days ago. “Like a snow globe?” He didn’t seem to understand. I shook my hands up and down around an imaginary glass sphere. “A snow globe. Niagara Falls.” The nerve of Marshall, putting that little souvenir in plain sight, so it could taunt me with my own plight. “Damn him! And these are your relatives?”

“My relatives?” He seemed taken aback by the question. “No.”

“You said they were your kin.”

“I said they were Kin. My race, yes, but no more my family or clan than you’re related to every human. Their goal is to keep you content. Unthinking. Asleep, almost, while they pump you for information.”

So we weren’t even dealing with something human, here. Interesting. And, quite frankly, since I was in a situation that made no logical sense, I was a little bit relieved there might be an explanation that I couldn’t have thought of through normal means. “So what, you’re from outer space? Is it Mars? You’re a Martian? Am I on Mars too?”

If it hadn’t been for the tenseness of the situation, I almost would have sworn he might have cracked a smile. “You’re not on Mars. Your people have always had legends of another race living among you. The Iroquois called us Jogah. The Chinese spoke of us as Mogui, and to the people of Europe we were fairies. Probably the correct description of us is the Peri, but among ourselves we call ourselves Kin, because . . . what are you doing?” He asked, when I almost toppled over from leaning forward on tiptoe.

“Nothing,” I said, a little guiltily.

“Yes, you are.” He narrowed his eyes. “Are you maybe looking for some kind of translucent wings?”

“Of course not!” I lied.

His eyes narrowed. “We’re sensitive about that.”

The Peri were, or him in particular? I made a noise of dismissal before changing the topic. “How long have you been trying to wake me up?”

He shook his head. “Not long. Less than a week.”

“How long have I been here?”

“I don’t know. The Storm Ravens found this place. In the real world, it sends out certain vibrations we can detect.”

I recognized that name from the book. “The Storm Ravens are. . . .”

“My clan. It’s complicated. It’s our job—it’s my job to investigate offenses such as this, particularly when the innocent are involved.” In my peripheral vision, I saw Mrs. McCuddy’s curious head appear over the rose-tangled picket fence dividing our properties. Knowing she was keeping an eye on me, I kept my distance from the man in uniform, trying to make it appear as if we were having an ordinary conversation. Apparently the milkman had the same idea. In a slightly louder than normal voice, he hung his head and said, “I’m real sorry the milk was off yesterday, ma’am. It must be the warm weather.” More softly, he added, “We don’t have much time. Tell me what you know about Lily Oliver.”

“Lilliwhat?” He might as well have asked me to recite the periodic table; I didn’t have a clue.

“Lily Oliver.” He repeated the syllables distinctly. “It’s a name.”

“I don’t know it.” With sudden hope, I asked, “Is it me? Am I Lily Oliver?” He shook his head. “Does she know who I am?”

“Is everything all right, Mrs. Jones?” Mrs. McCuddy’s voice, reedy and shrill, cut through our conversation. I startled a little bit, and hoped I didn’t appear too guilty. “Did I hear something was wrong with the milk?”

Mrs. McCuddy’s interest in me had always gone beyond mere nosiness. And hadn’t she always been reminding me of my good fortune in marrying Marshall? For the first time, I looked at my neighbor and knew that she was one of the they the milkman had been talking about. “It was sour,” I said flatly, detecting emotions I’d not felt in what seemed like ages. Anger was foremost among them. But no, I couldn’t arouse her suspicions. I still didn’t know what the real dangers were, here. “I’ll be with you in a moment!” She seemed placated, retreating slightly. I still caught glints of her eyes through the rosebush, however. I turned back to the conversation that mattered. “Where’s the stopper?”

“The what?” He raised his eyebrows, clearly not following.

If my mind had been in some kind of sleepy stasis before, adrenaline was now kicking it into overdrive. “The stopper,” I repeated, thinking aloud. “Snow globes have stoppers. That’s how the water gets into them. And if the water can get in, it can come out.” I pointed to my noggin, feeling confident. “I used to be smart, whoever I was. And what’s Cory . . . Corydonner?”

If I’d caught him off-guard with the snow globe analogy, hauling out the word my so-called husband had used the night before positively spooked him. In a way, I was satisfied not to be the only one getting a bolt from the blue. “Corydonais? That’s my name,” he said, more softly than even more. He looked askance in our neighbor’s direction. “I’m Corydonais. Why?”

“My husband is not very happy with you,” I told him. If I worked on the principle that the enemy of my enemy was my friend, then I was happy to have an ally.

“He found the book?”

“Did you put it upstairs?”

“Not I,” he said. “An agent of mine.”

“Well, he found it. And blew a gasket.”

For a split-second the man’s lips twitched. “Good.”

“Young man, are you gloating?” I said, trying not to grin.

If he had been, it didn’t last long. “I meant it as a warning. I can’t come here again,” he told me, bending over to take the empty bottles from the bin by the door. They clattered into the basket he carried. “It’s too dangerous now.”

“But . . . no!” For the first time in heaven knew how long I had some of the answers I’d craved. Okay, so nothing he’d told me about fairies and snow globes should have made any more sense than the average ramblings of the smelly homeless guy who rants at you outside your local McDonald’s. Crazy as they were, though, they resonated with more sense than the notion of me ensconced in suburban bliss. So he couldn’t just leave. I despised when people just upped and left me. “Cormorant! You can’t!”

“Corydonais,” the man said, slightly pained.

“Cor,” I implored, abbreviating.

He touched the brim of his hat again in a polite farewell, but paused before he left. “Something is binding you to him. An object. That’s your stopper. No, I don’t know what it is,” he added before I could ask. “But if you don’t find it. . . .”

“What?” I asked, demanding the answer. “What? I’ll suffocate in here forever?”

“Sorry. I really am.” Oh. That was it, wasn’t it? I could tell by the pity in his eyes that I’d hit the nail on the head. Fear’s icy grip seemed to tighten around my heart. Somehow I thought finding out the truth would be more liberating. “We appreciate your business, ma’am,” Cor called out from halfway down the sidewalk. “Have a good day, now!”

He was already in his van, engine started, before I could summon words to answer him. “Wait!” I wailed, as the buttercup-colored vehicle spluttered off. “Who’s going to deliver my milk?”

Honestly, it was unbelievable how much of the stuff my imaginary family went through.