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"Please don't do this." He takes a step toward me, then stops, with his hands half raised. Like a man unsure where it's safe to put them. "That isn't what I'm saying. I meant slow. I meant we should go slow."

"Slow is a perfectly good word."

"Then why do you look like that?"

"Like what?"

"Like you've shut a door."

"I haven't shut anything." I pick up my duffel from the bench and set it over my shoulder. It's heavy. My arm shakes with it. I hate that he can see. "I'm being sensible. Someone has to be."

"Don't be sensible."

"You were."

It lands. I watch it land, and I'm not proud. He opens his mouth and nothing comes out. The silence rolls out between us, wide and cold. From the top of the stairs comes the sound of running water and a small voice arguing about bubbles.

"I'm not going to yell," I say.

"That's worse."

"Yes." I look at him, at the lamp-lit stubble on his jaw and the blue eyes gone dark and pleading. For one second I nearly drop the bag. "Please say something."

"Stay tonight."

"Why?"

He stares at me. I watch him reach for it. I watch him search through everything he has and come up with nothing he's willing to say aloud in a hallway with his daughter upstairs. I feel my own chest cave in quietly from the inside.

"Because it's late," he says.

"That isn't a reason."

"Carolina..."

"When you know what it is, you can tell me."

I go up the stairs. I don't run. I set my hand flat on the banister and walk. Each step creaks. I think of the third stair at Nell's.

At the top Ruth is sitting on the closed lid of the toilet in the bathroom doorway with a towel across her knees. She looks at me for a long moment and says nothing. In the tub behind her Faith is turning the froth on her chin into a beard.

I nod. She nods back. There's nothing either of us can say with a seven-year-old in the tub.

Faith's room is at the end of the hall. It's small and yellow, with a rag rug and a bookshelf crammed with paperbacks and a poster of an owl on the closet door. I sit on the edge of the bed and wait for her.

She comes in ten minutes later in pajamas with sleeves too long, her hair wet and dark against her neck. She stops dead in the doorway when she sees my duffel bag on the floor.

"You're going."

"I'm going to sleep at my grandmother's house tonight. The one with the barn."

"Because of the barn?"

"Because it's mine, and I need to sleep in it."

She climbs onto the bed and sits cross-legged with her fox in her lap, her chin lowered, not looking at me. I put my hands between my knees to keep them still.

"Are you coming back?" she says.