When I came back in the living room, Manfred was withdrawing his hand from the backpack. He looked sad. “I’m sorry this happened to you, Harper.”

“Well, thanks for the kind thought, Manfred, but it happened to my sister. I was just caught up in the aftermath.”

“I’ll see you soon. Don’t worry if I don’t call for a couple of days. I’ve got a job to do.”

“Oh . . . okay, Manfred.” I hadn’t thought about worrying. He gave me a peck on the cheek when he left, and I was glad to shut the door behind him. I sat and thought about my sister.

It was a long night. I finally fell asleep after midnight.

Eighteen

Eighteen

TOLLIVER woke up the next morning feeling much better. He’d slept for twelve hours straight, and when he woke me up he let me know that he was full of energy. We had to be careful, but with me on top, sex was doable. Very doable. An absolute delight, in fact. And I thought the top of his head was going to fly off, he enjoyed it so much. He lay there panting afterward, as if he’d done the work, and I collapsed beside him, laughing in a breathless kind of way.

“Now I feel like myself,” he said. “Somehow it makes you feel even less like a man, when you’re bedridden and then you can’t even stand the physical part of having sex. Reduces you to a kid.”

“Let’s just get in the car and go,” I suggested. “Let’s go to the apartment. We could be in St. Louis in a day. You could ride that long, I bet.”

“What about staying here to visit more with the girls? What about finding out if my father was connected to the Joyces and Cameron?”

“Maybe you were right. Maybe we need to leave the girls to Iona and Hank. They’re stable, in every sense. We travel so much. We’ll never be a constant in their lives. And your dad? He’s going to hell anyway. If we drop all this, it’ll just take him a little longer. We could be free of him.”

Tolliver looked thoughtful. “Come here,” he said, and I put my head on his good shoulder. He didn’t wince, so that was all right. I stroked the part of his chest not covered with a bandage. Looking back on the time between my discovery that I loved him as a man and the time I found out he felt the same and we acted on it, I wondered how I had survived. We were incredibly lucky, and I knew there was a part of me that I found somewhat scary, the part that would do anything to prevent what we had from being jeopardized.

“You know what we ought to do,” he said.

“What?”

“We ought to take a day trip.”

“Oh, where to?”