“Know the reason for what?”

Joe looked up, frowning. “For why they do it in the first place.”

Trenton suddenly understood. He’d been chasing this story of an old murder, feeding on it like carrion birds did, but it was a sadder story than that: digging up the old, dry bones of someone’s misery.

“So it was suicide,” Trenton said.

Joe put two hands on the table and pushed himself to his feet. “My dad roped himself when I was a kid. My mom told everyone he bust an artery in his brain. Aneurysm. She was embarrassed. Even changed our name back a few years later, from Houston to Connelly. Connelly was her maiden name.” He shook his head again. “It doesn’t help to know. It doesn’t make it easier. Still, I shouldn’t have burned the letter. It wasn’t my business.”

Trenton sat there for a long time, thinking of his father’s many conferences and Adrienne’s letters, unanswered; thinking of a man hanging from the ceiling and his wife lying about it because she was embarrassed. He thought about faceless women. He thought about time coming down slowly around their ears, like a roof under the pressure of snow.

It was time, he thought, to bury his father. It was time to put the ghosts to rest.

ALICE

“Don’t go.” I’ve been trying to ignore Sandra for the length of her death, trying to expel her; and now I’m begging her to stay, like a child. “Please don’t go.”

“The jig’s up, isn’t it?” Already Sandra sounds fainter, as if I’m hearing her from a distance. “It’s about damn time, too.”

“Don’t leave me.” I hate myself for saying it, but I can’t help it: she’s my other, my boundary. Now there will be no one to hear me. It’s almost the same thing as not-existing, but worse. Lonelier. The Walkers will go home, and I will remain here, alone, openmouthed and silent in the doorways; frozen in the ice box; full of the darkness of empty closets and rooms that no one enters.

“You need to let go, Alice. That’s the whole trick. Let go of everything.”

“Tell me how,” I say. “I’m ready to learn.” Silence. “Sandra? Are you there?”

The only answer is a hole, a deep bottoming out, as if I still had a body and all the bones had suddenly vanished. Then—a sudden sickness, a reverse nausea, the sickness of something good and necessary going out.

Everything comes up in the end.

Sandra was right: old crimes expiated, truths revealed, curiosities satisfied.

How could I have been so blind? Sitting, watching, waiting, like a fat cat in a patch of sunlight, for years before she came along—but seeing nothing, really, feeling nothing but the slow crawl of time and minutes hardening like plaster in my veins. I remember Sandra’s death, vaguely. I saw the last fight she ever had with Martin, and the twenty-four hours that followed: the glass refilled and refilled, the stumbling and vomiting, the crust of blood on her lips.

I saw her load the gun, of course. How could I not? We can’t choose what we see.

But afterward . . . was I happy that she came to join me? Was I secretly pleased when she elbowed her way through the soft folds of my new nonbody, like a splinter beneath a surface of skin? Probably. And so I barely noticed the cleanup, the police, the sad small group of strangers who came to haggle over her pots and lamps and sofas when they were put up for sale.

I didn’t notice little Joey Houston, all grown up to become Joe Connelly, whom I had last seen sitting next to his mother at his father’s funeral service. I didn’t see the resemblance in the proud, hooked nose and determined chin, in the ears that stick out just a little more than usual.

Joseph Houston. Thomas’s son.

I’ve been so wrong—so wrong about everything.

I want to tell Sandra. You were right.

And Thomas: I forgive you.

And our little baby girl, the small promise that grew inside me like a flower under glass: I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

But those are just words, and words are just stories, and eventually, always, stories come to an end.

Caroline has changed into old jeans and a nubby sweater, and she returns to the dining room with her makeup scrubbed off and her hair tied in a ponytail. She must have snuck a few drinks. She is brighter eyed than she was just twenty minutes ago.

“Trenton, are you ready? Do you have the ashes?”

“Minna has them,” Trenton says. “I was just going to check—” Trenton is cut off. The kitchen door bangs open, and a second later Minna appears in the dining room, breathless, her hands covered with dirt.

A shadow moves across the sun; the house, my rooms, my mind goes dark. The end is very near.

“Come quickly,” Minna says, speaking not to her mom or brother but to Danny. “I—I found something. Holy shit.”

“What kind of something?” Trenton says.

Minna’s hands tighten on the door frame. I feel as if every single door in the house had been slammed shut at once—tight with expectation and terror. “It’s a kid.”

“A what?” Danny says.

“A baby.” Minna swallows and pushes her hair back, leaving a smudge of dirt on her cheek, like a single tear. “In a box.”

PART XI

THE KITCHEN

ALICE

The kitchen has been emptied of its furniture. Even the Spider has been packed up and carted away, and the old fireplace stands cold, clean-swept, dark, like a mouth open in a scream. Bits of cottonseed have found their way in through the window.

There is nowhere to place her but on the countertop.

Bits of the blanket remain, shreds and tatters, most of it eaten away by insects. The box is mostly intact: dark wood, laminated, it has stood up well to time. My initials are still faintly visible, although much of the rest of the paint has flaked away. It was yellow, I remember, and decorated with painted lilacs. It had been a gift from my mother on my seventeenth birthday, for holding my Sunday hat, fitted with lace as fine as a spider’s web and smelling of the lavender salts she placed next to it.

I wrapped her up in a blanket. I thought she would be safe, there, in the small yellow box that smelled like flowers.

Her bones are thin as a baby bird’s, her skull no larger than a palm.

She was blue when she came out—blue, and so cold.

I thought she would be warm—in the blanket, in the ground, under the willow tree.

TRENTON

The bones were small, far too small. Trenton felt a swinging sense of unreality, as he did sometimes in dreams, just before waking. It must be some kind of a sick joke.