Janet lay still for a moment, her heart lifting into her throat out of pure habit, the old dread coming up through her like cold through a slab. Then she pushed back the covers and got up, and put on her robe, and followed him.
He didn't stop in the hall. He didn't look up at the ceiling. He trotted past the open door of the spare room—empty now, the bed made, the silver P-51 turning slowly on its fishing line in the draft from the furnace—and through the kitchen and into the living room, and he leapt up onto the back of the couch under the big picture window and sat there with his tail curled around his feet, looking out.
Janet came and stood behind him.
Across Linden Street, the Doyle house had its porch light on. It burned yellow in the cold, and in its glow she could see his brother's Ford pickup parked at the curb, in the place where the Peterbilt used to take up half the street. Upstairs, in the small window on the left, there was a lamp lit, and as she watched, a shape moved across it—a boy, with his hair sticking up—and then a larger shape, slow, on crutches, and the lamp went out.
Milo watched until it was dark. Then he turned around on the back of the couch and looked at her, with his round black eyes and their thin green rings, and blinked once, slowly.
"I know," she whispered. "I see it. He's home."
"Jan?"
Del was standing in the kitchen doorway in his pajamas, his hair flattened on one side.
"You were awake," she said.
"Of course I was awake." He came and stood beside her and looked out at the porch light across the street. After a while he put his arm around her, and she leaned into him, and they stood there together in the dark living room with the furnace ticking and the teapot clock ticking and the cold pressing at the glass, and neither of them felt any need to say anything at all.
"Did you hear that?" Del said finally, very softly.
She went still. "What?"
He tipped his head toward the couch, where Milo had settled down onto the cushion in a round gray loaf and closed his eyes and begun, deep in his chest, to purr like an outboard motor.
"That," Del said.
Janet laughed. She laughed out loud in the middle of the night, and put her face in her husband's shoulder, and he held her, and the cat purred, and across the street the porch light burned on until morning.
And for the first time since October, all three of them slept straight through until the alarm.