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"Don't thank me yet. The coffee's terrible."

I hang up and sit with my hands flat on the table, on either side of Nell's photograph. I look at the kitchen. The blue gingham curtains. The scarred counter, with its two cracked blue tiles. The cast-iron skillet, which I set on the stove without noticing. The window over the sink, black now, with my own reflection floating in it.

I'm still wearing the green sweater. There's a faint warm ache in my thighs, and a mark under my ear. In my back pocket is a folded drawing of a woman with a dimple, holding a frying pan over her head.

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

I said it like a woman who was calm. I even meant it. But it's quiet out here, much quieter than I remember. The quiet has a shape. A space beside me on the bench where a man in a gray flannel might sit with a pen in his teeth. A space in the doorway where a small figure in yellow boots might stand and ask to see the weapon.

I take out the drawing. I unfold it and smooth it flat on the table, and put Nell's photograph on one corner to hold it down.

Outside, far down the hill, an engine turns over. I hear it, faintly, through the glass. A truck, I think, climbing in low gear. As it comes around the last bend the beams of its headlights sweep across the orchard and into the window, white and slow and full on my face.

Chapter 8 — Ethan

My mother waits until the sound of Carolina's engine has completely faded before she comes down the stairs.

I'm standing at the kitchen sink with the tap running over nothing. I've been standing there for what feels like an hour and is probably four minutes, looking at the black window. I don't turn around when she comes in. She crosses the linoleum, reaches past my shoulder, and turns off the water.

"You'll flood the yard."

I say nothing. She hangs the damp towel she's been carrying over the oven handle, smooths it flat, and leans against the counter with her arms folded. She's still in her church dress, with her glasses swinging on their chain and her silver hair flattened on one side from the bathroom steam. She regards me in the way she's regarded me since I was six years old and broke a window with a baseball.

"Faith's in bed. Supposedly. She's reading with a flashlight under the covers and thinks I don't know."

"Mom."

"Say it."

"I said what I thought."

"You said 'before we know what this is.' I heard you from the bathtub, Ethan, and so did Faith, I suspect, though she was pretending to be very interested in bubbles."

I close my eyes. "She didn't hear."

"She hears everything. She's yours."

"I was being careful."

"You were being scared." She says it as gently as anyone has ever said anything to me. "I've known you thirty-seven years. I watched you come up my porch steps that morning with a note in your fist and take that baby out of my arms, and I watched you decide that nobody was ever going to hurt that child again. It was a good decision. It kept her safe. But you made it so big that you've been standing in front of it ever since, and nobody can get past you. Including you."

"That isn't fair."

"It isn't a rule for Faith." She takes a step closer. "Faith has been hurt by exactly one thing in her life, and it wasn't a woman who stayed two days and drew a fox with a proper tail. It was a woman who left without a word. A rule doesn't mend that. What mends that is Faith watching her father not be afraid."

"I'm not afraid."

"You were so afraid just now that you couldn't say stay. I watched you try. You got as far as 'because it's late.'"

The kitchen clock ticks. I look at the table where Carolina sat all afternoon sorting her grandmother's mail into piles. At the chair where she hung her coat on Saturday. Something in my throat closes up.

"She's going home tomorrow. She told me Friday."

"Did she tell you Sunday?"

I open my mouth. Shut it. I replay the whole hall in my head. Her voice level and polite. I don't know yet, sweetheart. The way she crouched down to a seven-year-old's level and said I don't want to say yes and then not be there.

She never said she was leaving. She said she didn't know.