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.