He knew what Donna wanted—to see if they could rebuild a life, to put their marriage back together after Mary had forced them apart. She wanted something to fill the emptiness, but it was never going to happen. Without Mary, he had no life and didn’t want one.

“I wish you’d let me in,” Donna murmured.

Clark didn’t reply. He drank his beer. The bar was crowded, but the cacophony of voices created a bubble of privacy around the two of them. He would have been happier being alone. He didn’t want Donna or anyone else to share his grief.

“Do you still blame me?” she asked.

Clark hesitated and then shook his head. He had given up the anger he felt for Donna. She had no way of knowing that a monster was in the woods. It was just that life was so damn fragile, and there were so many predators out there. A girl goes to a store to buy a graduation gift and winds up kidnapped and strangled. A girl goes to a Halloween party and gets beaten to death in the backyard. A girl goes to an island resort and disappears forever. Fragile. There and gone in the time it takes to cry. No one was ever to blame, and no one ever seemed to pay the price.

“It wasn’t you,” he told her. “It could just as easily have been me with her when it happened.”

“Thank you, Clark. I needed to hear that.”

Clark realized that his hands were wrapped so tightly around the bottle of beer that his knuckles were white. The truth was that he wasn’t numb at all. He was holding his emotions down like a bathtub toy under the water, because he was afraid of them popping up. Afraid that his grief and fury would be like a tidal wave washing him away if he stared them in the face. He didn’t know how to deal with any of it. He could be hollow and dead, or he could open the locked door in his heart and go insane.

Behind him, wind and heat blew through the smoky air as the door opened. He heard a chorus of teenage chatter, and both he and Donna turned around as the players from a girls’ softball team squeezed into the bar, dressed in white jerseys and shorts, their long hair tumbling and blowing as they peeled off their caps. Their faces glowed with pinkness and sweat. They laughed and shoved each other; it was a postgame victory celebration. They dropped bats, gloves, and balls in a corner near the door, and one of the softballs rolled across the wooden floor and wound up at Clark’s feet. He leaned down and scooped it up. It was dirty and solid. A girl about Mary’s age, stocky and strong, with chestnut hair, clapped her hands and waved at him. Clark tossed the ball to her underhanded. She caught it with a big grin and juggled it in her hands as she slouched into a chair.