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"You're welcome," I say.

"Are you going to fix mine too? The one in my bathroom?" Her eyes narrow at the cupboard. "It's fine. It's totally fine. Don't touch it."

"Is it dripping?" says Roman hopefully.

"It's fine."

"I could—"

"Roman."

"Right." A pause, the wrench clinks. "Ask first."

"Don't ask. Just don't." She finishes the cereal, sets the bowl in the sink with great care, and stops with her hand on the doorframe. For a moment the mask slips, only for a second, and she looks suddenly younger, the nine-year-old in the purple puffy jacket with a tiger painted on her face. "Hey, Roman."

"Yes?"

"Rat in separate."

The cabinet is silent. Then, in a voice I'd know anywhere, rough and delighted and a little hoarse, "Rat in separate."

"Okay," says Charlotte. She nods to herself, satisfied, as if a box has been checked, and goes out. I hear her take the stairs two at a time, skipping the fourth, and her bedroom door shuts overhead with the ostentatious softness of someone who knows exactly who's listening.

I sit with my tea going cold and I don't trust my voice.

There's a long, careful scrape from the cabinet, a last click of metal on metal, and then, with the unmistakable pleasure of a man who has found something exactly where he left it, Roman says, "There."

He slides out on his back with the wrench in one fist and his hair standing up in every direction and a smear of grease across one cheekbone, and he lies there looking up at me, flushed and grinning, a grown man on a kitchen floor on the happiest morning of his week.

"Listen," he says.

I listen.

The kitchen is quiet. It used to make me cry once. I remember that, the first time I heard it ring. I don't cry now.

I only sit with my tea in the gold light and let it be quiet, the old clock over the stove, the creak of the house settling, my daughter walking across the floor upstairs.

Nothing's dripping. Nothing's wrong. The blue dish sits by my elbow with the honey in it and I take up the dipper and let one spoonful fall, slow and gold, into my tea.

"Nothing," says Roman softly. "That's what that sounds like."

I look down at him. He looks back at me with those river-colored eyes I'd cross any room for, still lying on my kitchen floor with the wrench against his chest as if he's never wanted to be anywhere else.

I have never been so happy to hear nothing.

"Thursday," I say. "I was thinking the porch light."

He starts to laugh.