“No. But thank you. I want us all together.”

“Think it through, Norman. You can’t understand him right now anymore than these girls can. Or me. He’s got three cousin boys all ages surrounding him and those four can parse death in ways none of the rest of us can begin at. I’m not offering you anything; it’s him I’m thinking of. What he needs right now is diversion and people that speak his own language and he’s not going to get any of that in this house for the time being.”

“I’ll not turn from him for convenience. His mother would not forgive me.”

“There. You’ve made my point.” Her eyes on him were delicate, bright-veined, dry. “Her forgiveness isn’t something to be concerned with.”

“He won’t want to go.”

“What he wants right now he can’t have anyway.”

“That’s cruel.”

“Norman. I’m the least cruel person you’ll ever know in your life.” Then she paused and he saw the hurt smirch her face. She said, “I never once truly doubted you Norman but this time I know best.”

And he turned away from her, the intent and focus in her too bright to believe, all that lost to him. And turned to see Abby gazing wide-eyed at him and then to Prudence with her swollen face squirmed up with pain and through this she was nodding at him. He turned back to his sister. “All right then. A week, ten days. If he wants home before then, you’ll bring him.”

She nodded and laid her hand on his arm. People were leaving, and he wanted them gone. Wanted the house empty, wanted the quiet for the vacuum of his heart to spread out and join together with that other vacuum cringing back already and always in the shadows and corners of the rooms, wanted this last marriage of solitude opened to him, not to dwell in grief or memory but to live within what was there now: the vast array that he believed would number his days in a polarity to those of his life ended when she cut the length of rope, when she took the train home, when Marthe Ballou was murdered. When she stepped off the granite.

So Norman and the girls went round the house and farm and what work needed doing each day for most of a week, each tender and withdrawn into themselves, aware of the others and each also aware nothing could be offered. Odd moments the girls touched their father, he stood with their brief caress and could not touch them back, as if laying hands on them was too close to touching Leah; they accepted this or perhaps with their own swept-tight sorrow feared his. Perhaps they merely understood it. The day he drove to the village to go over legal matters with the lawyer Sutherland and meet with the banker to consolidate accounts the girls cleared the closets and drawers in his room of her clothing and effects, which he noted that evening and winced before the loss and thanked his daughters without speaking, aware his new habit of stepping into the closet before bed to lay his face among her hung garments was not a thing to be continued but a small indulgence best done with.