He crosses to the picture window. Outside, the trees on the horizon are darkening as the sky begins to glow behind them. He blows on his hands, imagining the cold outside. Still, it looks like it will be a nice day after all, clear, if cold. The traffic won’t be too bad, that means, so they can stay at the very least until after lunch before they have to leave. A short visit, Wilson thinks, but worthwhile. Last night, when after another half hour of searching he and Ruth had returned to the house—both of them at the same time, which coincidence set Wilson’s heart racing, because he thought that their approaching the house at the same time, their giving up the search at the same moment, could only be a bad sign—and gone inside and hurried to the kitchen, perhaps to use the phone (they hadn’t exchanged words, just looks), they had found Isabelle there, at the table with her grandmother. Eleanor and Isabelle had looked up at Ruth and Wilson as if surprised to see them there, as if it had been Ruth and Wilson and not Isabelle herself who had gone missing into the night and then just as suddenly returned. Aside from Ruth’s and Wilson’s empty seats and the comparative cleanliness of the kitchen, the scene seemed to pick up exactly where it had left off nearly two hours before: there was a pot of tea on the table beneath a cozy, a plate of English muffins and another one of oatmeal cookies, and eggs on the boil.

They didn’t ask what happened. They didn’t ask where Isabelle had gone, or when she had returned, or how the two of them, Isabelle and her grandmother, happened to be sitting once again where they had been before as if they’d never been interrupted, as if the news about Maggie’s sickness had never been let loose. Maggie herself lay on the dog bed in the corner, chewing on a piece of rawhide too intently to acknowledge Ruth and Wilson with more than a glance. Ruth caught Wilson’s eye. Wilson blinked and gave her a semi-smile, and she followed his lead and pulled out a chair at the table, too cold and dazed with worry and relief to do more than take the tea she was offered and watch the steam curl upward from it, every now and then glancing through that curling steam at Isabelle, as if the steam would offer protection from what she expected to be Isabelle’s looks of fury.