"She does," Emery said, and something in the room loosened a little.
Linnea was quiet for a while. Then she said, to her mother, not quite looking at her, "Are you going to write the number on our fridge again?"
"If I get to come home," Noelle said. "Yes. I think so. If you want me to."
"Can I still make dots?"
Noelle looked at Dr. Mehrotra, and Dr. Mehrotra looked at Emery, and Emery understood that this was his to answer.
"No dots, Bug," he said. "Here's the new rule. If you ever smell it, ever, you tell me. Out loud. You don't make a dot. You don't wait. And I'll answer." He took his phone out and showed her, because he had done it that first night lying awake beside her, and had checked it every day since: her contact, Linnie's Watch, with the little fox face, and beneath it, toggled green, the setting called Emergency Bypass, which meant her calls would ring through silence and meetings and Do Not Disturb. "It rings even if I'm in a meeting. Even if I'm asleep. And I'm going to listen to every message, even the ones that are just your sleeve."
Noelle came home to Locust Street on the second Sunday in December, with her bag and a new rule of her own, which was that she would not be alone with Linnea for more than two hours at a time until the spring, and that the question would be asked every night, propped on an elbow, in the dark. He asked it the first night. Hard, she said. Hard. I'm scared of the kitchen.
On Monday morning she stood at the refrigerator with the marker.
The old board was still there. Emery had kept his promise. Eight hundred and sixty-two, and Brave, and nine pencil dots pressed into the white in the bottom right corner, so deep that he had tried once, in November, alone, with a magic eraser, just to see, and they had not come out. Noelle looked at them for a long time. Then she took the board off the door and put it, very carefully, in the drawer of the hall table, face up, where it would not get scratched, and she took a new one out of a Target bag and stuck it on the refrigerator and wrote, in her round black hand, the number on her mother's index card that morning.
59