He drove it at eight miles an hour.
She did not think he knew he was doing it. His hands were at ten and two on the wheel, and his foot was barely touching the gas, and the car crept past the stone lions at the Dowds' and the dark shuttered windows of the Benedetto place like a car in a funeral procession, and she looked at his face in the green light off the dashboard and saw that he was not looking at the road. He was looking ahead, up the lane, at the last house, where the porch light was burning yellow through the rain.
The front window was lit, too. The television, with the sound off, throwing its blue and white flicker across the ceiling. And in front of the window, she could see from here, the shape of the high back of the brown leather chair, and above it, the shape of a head.
The car came even with the house. And then, for the first time in four years, it did not go on to the turnaround.
It stopped.
Conor Sheehan put it in park. He did not turn off the engine. He did not take his hands off the wheel. He sat there looking at the window, and Solange sat beside him and looked at it too, and in the window, slowly, as they watched, a hand came up off the arm of the chair. The left hand. An inch, no more. The way a man lifts his hand at a funeral when he sees someone he knows across the room.
She heard the breath go out of the man beside her. It was not a sob. It was not anything you could have written down. It was only breath, going out, and not coming back in for a long time.
"How long," he said finally. He did not look away from the window. "How long has he been doing that?"
"Since I came," Solange said. "Before, I think. Fabiola says on my days off also. Every night." She paused. "In the snow, two winters ago, he saw you had chains on. He said, good."