His lower lip was pulled up between his teeth. His head nodding slightly, thinking, not agreeing. After a moment he said, “I’m confused here. Except unless you got the one thing wrong. But let me wait with that. Tell me the other part. The part of her explaining herself, what she felt guilty over.”

“The Peter part.”

“I guess that would be it.”

“It’s hard, Daddy.”

“Harder than the other?”

“Lots harder.”

“Why do you think so?” The room now very still around them, the whole house somnolent with winter night, with solitude, with the lives within settled down to just this pair, the fire in the small freestanding stove almost silent but for brief sounds as a bird turning in a nest, the rest of the house even absent the nightsounds of settling jamb or fractional easing of a nail in a stair tread or the weight of generations of ghosts clambered together up attic against the cold as if the house itself had surrendered to the recent violence or even just made peace for the night against the ferocious and dreadful calm passing between the two in the small office—that room vibrant—the two each etched with blue color before the worndown brass lamplight, etched around as fine tuberous electricity given off as both sat facing the other, both knowing this was no picking of a recent scab but as if both joined together to dig the hole that would hold them there once dug as surely and everlasting as a grave. So both calm before it, the young woman and the middle-aged man, not so much father and child, now or any longer, as much as cohabitants of an island country built out of the night. Launched and stranded at once, forever. The blooming nightflower, not seen again. The two plantigrades, now forever after walking hard on their heels as if not trusting the earth.

Abigail said, “It was what she was saying that was so hard. And the way she spoke. There was no calm in her. She wasn’t loud. But her voice was wild, that wildness of an anguish beyond control. There wasn’t any of the certainty, the bitterness, when she was speaking to the other one. This was all torment to her. She was telling him that he’d known all along what he was doing. That he was trading himself for her. That she hated her ignorance not to have seen it at the time. That she knew better. And wondered if she had just not allowed herself to know. Or that she had hidden it from herself, had told herself she was leaving a life behind and making a new one for herself. That this was courage. That this was what people did. But it was cowards finally who believe they can lay down one life and pick up another and not have them meet again. Told him perhaps it was the Lord who allowed her to do that only so when she came back she would stand revealed before herself in the full glory of retribution. That no punishment could be greater than to find in herself that all the rest of her life, that new life, all that was made from a lie. Lying to herself. That the Lord knew she could undo nothing and yet could not go on as before. And so was stranded in her hatred, was left to hate herself and all she’d made for herself. With no escape. Beyond escape. Daddy, the way she said his name, not just once but when she called him it was over and over, like beads on a string. Peter Peter Peter Peter. The way that one word each time carries everything in it that can’t be said, that hasn’t got a voice. You know just what I mean.”