Her death, when it came, surprised and crushed him. She’d gone into the hospital the week before, having been unable to hold down her food, but insisting, as well as she’d been able, that she felt all right. Stomach cancer, a tumor the size of a football—a doctor told Devlin that she must have felt it. His father was with her at the end, and Devlin knew that something passed between them, but the old man didn’t want to talk about it … at first. But he started falling apart, and one night, bleary on vodka, he talked, confessed, sobbed, his final questions a plea for absolution. Her last words to him, whispered, croaked in the heat of her oxygen tent: I hate you. “She didn’t mean it, did she, son? It was the stroke talking, don’t you think? She never said anything like that about me to you, did she?”

Devlin said no, but inside he was thinking that she had been so unhappy that she had allowed herself to die. Maybe the old man sensed something in his son, because his own decline accelerated. Devlin’s friends told him that he was justified in putting the old man in a home, but Devlin never seriously thought of it, even when the apartment stank of beer and old age, when the old man’s nurses quit, one after another, because of his foul-mouthed ingratitude. The old man hobbled on, ever more feeble and confused, then incontinent, until he fell down a flight of stairs in the autumn of 1981. Devlin slipped into a depression that didn’t lift until after his father’s estate was settled almost three years later—two years ago. Some people thought Devlin had had a tough, heartbreaking life. Devlin’s mind hadn’t worked that way since the day he’d met Eileen. She said they were lovers who had become best friends, but he didn’t care about the definitions. He was desperately in love with her. He considered himself a man who had come through, who was still learning, glad to be awake and alive, a happy man. And thanks as much to the strongbox under the old man’s bed as his life insurance, and a rent that was still under three hundred dollars a month, Devlin considered himself relatively wealthy, too.…

Devlin was closing the front door when Eileen called from the bedroom, “I thought you wouldn’t be able to resist me.”

Now he saw that the bedroom light was on. “I’m sorry,” he answered. “I was going to get into bed beside you as quietly as I could.”

She was sitting up. “I woke up at eleven and turned on the news, and I’ve been awake ever since. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for him, I’m sorry for you.”

They kissed. “I’m supposed to see Steve Loncaric tomorrow.”

“We’ll do what needs doing.”