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He pulls his hood up, and then, without opening his eyes, he says, “I had the lamp on.”

“Yeah?”

“Didn’t help.”

“No.”

“Still better than the dark.”

He’s asleep before we’re off the ground. I put the phone away and try the same thing.

It’s after midnight when I get home. There are shoes beside the door that aren’t mine, a small pair shoved beneath Astrid’s, and a schoolbag against the wall where there was nothing Friday morning. Her piano isn’t here yet. The front room is still mostly empty.

Somebody left a covered plate in the refrigerator with my name on it. I eat standing up, and halfway through a floorboard sounds upstairs. I turn with the fork still in my hand, but nobody comes down.

Tova’s door is open a few inches when I go up. The lamp I bought is on, throwing a strip of light across the landing, and I can see one corner of the desk and three pencils lined up beside a book. Astrid comes out of our room.

“She leaves it on,” she says. “I turn it off when I go to bed.”

“I’ll get it.”

She passes me and goes in herself. The light disappears, and she pulls the door back to the same gap.

“Did you eat?”

“Every bite. Thank you.”

I put a hand at her waist and kiss her. She kisses me back, but there’s something measured in it that wasn’t there last week.

Fair.

“I missed you.”

“You were gone two days.”

“I counted them myself.”

“Come to bed,” I say.

She does.

Ruth is at my kitchen table Monday morning opening an envelope with the edge of a butter knife. She has her own key, her own mug, and eighteen years of evidence against me, most of it filed somewhere I can’t find.

“Coffee’s made.”

I slept through Astrid getting up, through Tova leaving for school, through breakfast in a house where nobody has ever left for school before.

Ruth pushes a page toward me. “Sign.”

I sit, sign where she taps, and reach for the coffee she already poured.

“The furniture receipt came through,” she says.

“Astrid asked for it.”

“I know. She asked me too.”

The mug stops halfway to my mouth.