* * *
Nora came home at 4:20 in the morning. The rain had stopped. The power was still out up and down Ferry Street, and the town was very dark and very quiet, every gutter running, and the river, when she'd crossed the bridge over Marlow Creek on the way back, had been a wide, brown, muscular thing, three feet over the bike path but already, by the numbers, starting to drop.
The front door was unlocked. She came into the hall and smelled wet canvas. His jacket was hanging on the fourth hook, next to Daniel's coat, still dripping slowly onto the floor mat.
She went upstairs with her own flashlight pointed at the steps.
They were on the floor of Lila's room. Lila had dragged her comforter down off the bed at some point and made a nest of it against the wall, and she was asleep in it, curled up like something in a shell, and Tom was asleep sitting up with his back against the wall and his head tipped back and his mouth slightly open. One flashlight was still on, standing on end on the rug, throwing a weak yellow circle onto the ceiling. Its batteries were nearly gone. Lila's hand was holding a fold of his flannel shirt, the way she used to hold the edge of Daniel's sleeve when she was a baby and couldn't sleep.
Nora stood in the doorway for a long time.
Then she went and got the spare blanket from the hall closet and put it over him, and he didn't wake, and she switched off the dying flashlight and went downstairs and sat at the kitchen table in the dark with her coat still on, and for the first time in fourteen months she cried until she was empty, without holding any of it back, without listening for footsteps on the stairs.
* * *
In the morning, with the power back and the kitchen full of gray light and the coffee maker gargling, she said, "I'm ready."
He was standing at the counter, holding a mug of coffee, black. Lila was still asleep upstairs. He didn't ask what she meant.
He took out his phone and set it on the table between them and pressed the screen. Then he went and stood by the back door, looking out at the wet yard and the gap between the Pruitts' garage and the Delgados' fence, where the river showed, so that she could listen without him watching her.
"Tommy. It's Danny." A breath. Behind it, crickets, and the sound of the back steps creaking. Her own back steps. "Don't hang up. Well—you can't hang up, it's a voicemail. I'm an idiot. Okay. So. I don't really know how to do this, so I'm just going to do it badly. I have a kid. You know that, I think—Nora sent you a card. Her name is Lila. She's four. Tonight she asked me if I had a brother, because her friend Mason has one, and I said yes, and she said where is he, and I said far away, and she said why, and I didn't have a good answer. And I'm tired of not having a good answer, Tommy. I've been not having a good answer for six years."
Nora put her hand flat on the table.
"I said a lot of stuff in that parking lot. Some of it I meant. Most of it I didn't. And you said some stuff, and I've been thinking about it for six years, and I think maybe some of it was true. I think maybe I did like being the good one. It's easy to be the good one when the other one's drowning. That's not—that's not a great thing to find out about yourself." A pause. A long breath. "Anyway. I take the 5:52 into Marlow Landing every night. Every night she's on the platform. She runs at me like she's been shot out of a cannon, and I give her whatever junk I've got in my pocket, and she acts like I've given her the moon. If you ever want to see what that looks like—just get on the train. I'll be the one getting off." His voice went odd. "She looks like Mom, Tommy. Around the eyes. You'd—I think you'd like her. Okay. That's it. Call me back. Or don't. But I hope you do. Bye, Tommy."
The message ended. The kitchen was quiet except for the coffee maker.
Nora sat very still. Then she took out her own phone, and opened the voicemail screen, and scrolled down past the dentist and the pharmacy and her mother, all the way to the bottom, and pressed the last one. Fourteen seconds. August twenty-first. 8:12 in the morning.
"Hey, it's me." Daniel's voice, in her kitchen, the real one, a little hurried, with the sound of the train behind it. "Nothing important. Just—remind me tonight, I have to tell you something. About Tommy. I called him a while ago. I should've told you. I'll tell you tonight. Do we need milk? Love you. Bye."