In the morning, she came down to find Keith reading her pages. Her essay. Like, really reading it. She stood in the doorway watching. Well, this was new. This was different. Usually he read her work with this pained look on his face and afterward he’d say she had “a wild imagination” and had “clearly really been into it,” although it was “probably just over his head,” because he was “a dunce with no literary training.”

Good? she said today.

Wow, he said.

His face was red and his leg was bouncing under the table.

Ha. That was nice. That was—flattering. She was totally wiped out this morning, but so what? She drifted into the kitchen, tidied up the little writing desk they’d bought at Target. So it would be ready. For the next burst. Keith yelled that he was going for a run. Wow. Keith hadn’t gone running in years. It was as if reading her essay had made him want to be as good at something as she was at writing. Not to brag. But that was what good writing did, she realized: you said what you really thought and it made a kind of energy, and that sincere energy flowed into the mind of the reader. It was amazing. She was an essayist.

All these years she’d just been working in the wrong genre.

It had taken this terrible thing happening to Derek to make that clear. She wouldn’t have chosen it. But it had happened. And now she had to honor it.

She sat down to write.

Her phone rang.

Story of her life.

They’d caught the second guy, the cop said, the one with the duct-tape ball, breaking into a car, and he’d confessed to pushing Derek down. The cop read her the guy’s statement: “Yeah, I pushed him down. He seemed like a smug little shit. I don’t know why I did it, really. But he lived. And now maybe he’s not so smug. I bet not. You’re welcome.”

It’s actually kind of funny, the cop said. They’re cousins.

Who? she said.

The, uh, two suspects, he said. You know Dimini’s? The furniture store? Gus Dimini’s their uncle.

Wow, Dimini’s. They’d bought their TV there. Nice place. Fading place. Their big thing was, on St. Patrick’s Day, they gave away green socks. Called themselves “O’Dimini’s” for the week. It had been an Irish neighborhood when she was a kid. Now it was—who knew what it was? Everything down there was boarded up. You’d see a huddle of shopping carts on a lawn. A wading pool full of crankshafts. The occasional Confederate flag. But Gus Dimini was a sweetie. Big round man, full white beard. Roaming benevolently around the place like it was a restaurant. Like he was about to seat you at one of his outdoor patio suites.