I heard myself: pompous, self-righteous, vapid, the kind of puffed-up little prick who spends his school days lecturing his classmates on the evils of alcohol and getting his head slammed into locker doors. If I believed in curses, I would believe that this is mine: when it matters most, in the moments when I know with the greatest clarity exactly what needs to be done, everything I say comes out wrong.

Jenny said—to the machines and the walls and the air, as much as to me—“He’ll be all right.”

She was planning her note again. “Mrs. Spain,” I said. “I understand a little of what you’re going through. I know you probably don’t believe me, but I swear on everything that’s holy, it’s the truth. I understand what you want to do. But there are still people who need you. There are still things you need to do. You can’t just let go of those. They’re yours.”

Just for a second, I thought Jenny had heard me. Her eyes met mine, startled and clear, as if in that instant she had caught a glimpse of the world still turning, outside this sealed room: children outgrowing their clothes and old people forgetting old hurts, lovers coming together and coming apart, tides wearing rock away to sand, leaves falling to cover seeds germinating deep in the cold earth. For a second I thought that, by some miracle, I had found the right words.

Then her eyes fell away and she twisted her hand out of mine—I hadn’t realized, until then, that I was squeezing it tight enough to hurt. She said, “I don’t even know what Conor was doing there. When I woke up in here, when I started remembering what happened, I thought probably he was never there at all; probably I’d imagined him. Right up until you said it today, I thought that. What was he … ? How did he get there?”

I said, “He had been spending a bit of time in Brianstown. When he saw that you and Pat were in trouble, he came to help.”

I saw the pieces start falling into place, slowly and painfully. “The pin,” Jenny said. “The JoJo’s pin. Was that … ? Was that Conor?”

I had too little mind left to figure out which answer was the most likely to hold her, or the least cruel. The second of silence told her. “Oh, God. And I thought …” A quick, high gasp, like a hurt child’s. “The break-ins, too?”

“I can’t go into that.”

Jenny nodded. That surge of fight had used up the last of her strength; she looked almost past moving. After a while she said quietly, “Poor Conor.”

“Yes,” I said. “I suppose so.”

We sat there for a long time. Jenny didn’t speak, didn’t look at me; she was done. She leaned her head back on the pillows and watched her fingers tracing the creases in the sheet, slowly, steadily, over and over. After a while her eyes closed.