"And you," said Lila into her shoulder.
That night Nora sat on the bed in the dark with her phone in her hand and opened the voicemail screen and scrolled down past the dentist and the pharmacy and her mother to the old ones, the ones she had saved, eleven of them, all labeled Daniel. Call me back. Running late, train's stuck at Croton. Do we need milk. Hey, it's me. Hey, it's me. Hey, it's me. Her thumb hovered over the last one, from the morning he died. Fourteen seconds long. She had never played it. She did not know what was in it. She thought it was probably about milk.
She put the phone face down on the comforter and sat there until her thumb stopped shaking.
* * *
On the last Thursday in October, a little after six, Nora pulled into the strip of businesses on 9D north of the motel to pick up a prescription at the pharmacy, and saw Tom Hale come out of Riverside Wine & Spirits with a brown paper bag in his hand.
She saw it the way you see an accident. Everything slow. Everything very bright. The red neon OPEN sign. The shape of the bottle inside the bag, the long neck of it showing above the fold. His face, which was not Daniel's face at all, in that moment; it was entirely his own, pale and closed and set, like a man walking into cold water.
He saw her truck. He stopped.
She was out of the cab before she had decided to be, and across the lot, and she heard her own voice, very level, the voice she used at public hearings when someone from a developer's office was explaining to the county that the wetland wasn't really a wetland.
"Is that what I think it is?"
He didn't hide it. That was the thing she would remember later, when she could remember anything. He didn't put it behind his back. He just stood there holding it.
"Yes," he said.
"You were at our house four days ago. You sat at my table. You were on the floor with my daughter, building a—" She couldn't think of the word. "She's been asking for you every day. Every single day. When's Sunday. Is it Sunday. And you—"
"Nora."
"I watched my father do this. Do you understand? I was her age, and I watched him walk out of places like that with bags like that, and he always had a really good reason. It was just one. It was just to take the edge off." Her voice was going up now and she couldn't stop it. A woman coming out of the pharmacy with a little white bag stopped and looked at them and kept going. "I'm not doing that to her. I'm not letting you do that to her. She already lost one of you."
"I haven't opened it," Tom said quietly.
"Not yet."
He was silent.
"Stay away from my house," Nora said. "Stay away from my daughter. If you want to send her a birthday card, send it. But you don't get to come up my steps again. I don't care whose face you have."