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I nodded. “Seems reasonable. Can we arrange a time for me to come and look at it properly?”

“Of course. Will you still be in the area tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“You could come back at one o’clock tomorrow. Or…” He frowned and hesitated. “Where are my manners? Why don’t you stay the night? There’s plenty of spare rooms in the mansion.”

I smiled inwardly. This was going perfectly. “That would be great. Are you sure, though? I know you don’t like visitors very much. I mean, I practically had to extract teeth from a chicken just to get a meeting with you.”

“For an Ashwood, I’m sure,” he said, slapping me on the back. “Especially one who might be giving me three hundred grand for a chunk of land I don’t even use.”

I chuckled along with him. Then we got in his truck and headed back up to the mansion. For several minutes, Jacob opened and closed his mouth repeatedly, as if he wanted to ask me something but wasn’t sure. Finally, he spoke up again.

“I just realized I’ll need to provide meals for you. We can eat breakfast by ourselves in the mansion if we want, but dinner is always a communal event here at New Eden. It’ll seem strange to the others if I’m not there, and they might worry. At the same time, I’d feel terrible making you eat dinner alone in your room.” He cocked his head to the side. “You don’t mind eating with us, do you?”

“Of course not. Do the women come to the mansion to cook for us?” I asked.

He shook his head. “They only come to the main house on rare occasions, because it scares them. So we all eat dinner together in a dining room near the men’s quarters at seven o’clock. That’s not in the mansion.”

“That’s fine.”

He went quiet again for a moment. “The thing is, you might find our living arrangements in New Eden to be… odd,” he finally said. “We’ve never had a guest inside the living quarters before, aside from new member prospects who always end up staying permanently. I don’t want any word of how we operate out here to reach the outside world. We value our privacy here verystrongly.”

“I wouldn’t breathe a word to anyone. Even if I did, you’d know exactly where it came from, so you could send a hit squad after me.” I forced a laugh to show I was kidding.

Jacob smiled thinly. “I’m glad to hear that,” he said. “I sincerely hope you don’t disappoint me.”

“I promise, Mr. Chastain. I won’t tell anyone.”

He nodded. “All right. We have to walk there from here.”

He parked the truck by the mansion, and then he led me around to the back and down a familiar path. In the distance was a decrepit white clapboard chapel. I remembered it from eleven years ago. It had been built on the land by settlers over two centuries ago, but when the structure was weakened due to flooding, they abandoned it.

“I remember that old church,” I said, nodding toward it. “Back in the day, your daughter told me you were digging there for pirate treasure.”

Jacob’s eyes widened, and then he laughed. “My Jolie always had quite the active imagination,” he said. “Unfortunately, there’s no pirate treasure there.”

We drew closer to the church. “Where exactly are we going?” I asked, peering around in search of other buildings. There were none to be seen, however. Just the decaying church. “Surely you don’t pack everyone into that tiny old building.”

“No.” Jacob stopped and gave me a hard look. “This is the part we don’t want people talking about. Rumors can get ugly.”

My forehead wrinkled. I was beyond confused.

He went on. “We wanted the girls and women to feel extra safe after the attack. Because they were all so scared of the world, we built them a haven beneath the earth. We’re actually standing on it right now.”

I shook my head slowly. “Sorry, what?”

Jacob gestured to our feet. “Below this soil is an underground shelter big enough to fit over three hundred people. We’re thinking of extending it, too, seeing as we have so many babies on the way.”

I stared at him, thunderstruck. Was he serious? They actually kept the women in a fucking underground shelter for their whole lives?

“I can see you’re shocked, but you must remember, the women are terrified of the outside world now,” Jacob said. “Being outside for even an hour scares them.”

I swallowed hard. “Oh, no, I understand,” I lied. “It’s just so surprising to me that you were able to construct an underground shelter in this type of soil. How do you prevent flooding?”

“It wasn’t the easiest of tasks, but we had some fantastic engineers working for us,” Jacob said. “They set up extensive drainage systems to pump all the water out of the soil, and the rest is history.”

“That’s… impressive.”

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