Summer's Lease
an excerpt

None of the roads they took had names, and very few were on the map. Their navigation—Janet’s navigation—was a combination of guesswork and sheer luck.

But they weren’t going anywhere, so why worry? They would get there in the end, wherever there was. Wherever Thomas could find a weaker patch in the walls of the world. Wherever Thomas could get back to his queen.

They had been happy for a time after she saved him from her—thought she had saved him from her—and they had raised their child together. More and more, though, as Kylie approached her eighteenth birthday and freedom in the world, he had started to shut her out, to ignore her, to leave the simple chores she gave him undone.

And, at last, Janet had asked him what was wrong.

Sometimes she wished she never had. Kylie lived in Boston now, was in her last year of college. Janet knew she wouldn’t go to her daughter’s graduation. Thomas was afraid of cities, even small ones. The metal in the telephone lines overhead made him jittery and cautious. Boston, with its lights and traffic jams, its tall buildings and its bustling streets, would destroy him.