“Please don’t kill me,” I prayed into the asphalt.

It was eternity before the cold weight of the gun vanished from my neck.

“Don’t try to get up,” he said again, and then the knee was gone as well.

I gasped in dizzy lungfuls of air, hardly aware how much life his knee had choked from my chest, and I waited until his footsteps receded, never looking up, never turning to see his true form. I waited until a lonely car or two blew past on the street. I waited until someone else emerged from the bar and presumed me drunkenly passed out and stepped over me.

He hadn’t taken my cell phone, because it had slid away in the dark. He took only my wallet. What small miracles we are granted.

The police dropped me off at my apartment, but I couldn’t bear to go inside where I would be alone in the dark. When I finally did, and locked the door, and pulled a chair in front of it, and removed the chair to check again that the door was locked, even then, even with the barricade, sleep eluded me, chased away by every rattle of the loose windowpanes and every scratch of wind.

Elizabeth was full of apologies. In one of them, an invitation to stay with her for a while managed to sneak, perhaps unintentionally, past her lips.

How long has it been since I stayed with them? A year, perhaps? At times it feels like only a few days since I moved back home; sometimes it feels like I have never left at all, that everything beyond these walls has never truly existed.

I look up at Elizabeth. It seems strange to see her here; she hardly ever visits. I wonder how permanent her stay will be.

“Do you think it’s over between you two?”

Her face twists. “I don’t know.” She turns her wedding ring on her finger, around and around. “I don’t know.”

Mother returns with extra lemon wedges. “I’ll go make up the bed. The sheets must be dusty. Sam, would you help your sister bring up her things? She really shouldn’t be carrying anything heavy.” She sets down the tray of lemons and stands there as if unsure where to settle her hands. “Just think—a baby, here! A blessing in disguise.”

I carry Elizabeth’s luggage upstairs to her old room, where a four-poster bed holds court with a weatherworn desk and a dresser bearing framed photographs. Soft ragged posters line the walls: Audrey Hepburn, Green Day, American Beauty, a Degas facsimile. Artifacts of adolescent angst. The canopy above the bed drapes down in a gauzy cotton-mouthed smile.

“I see she still hasn’t changed anything in here.” She sits down heavily, and the beleaguered bedsprings squeal. “I used to pretend I was a princess locked away in the highest tower of a castle when I pulled down the canopy around me.” She sighs. “How’s Mom been?”

“Same as ever,” I say. “But I can sense a change now that you’re here.”