After Corey had gone to bed, he went in to check on her. The room was cold, unnaturally cold, and it took him a minute to realize the window was open—not just cracked, but open all the way on the night and the two-story drop to the yard below, where the moon drew shadows from the trees and silvered the lids of the garbage cans lined up against the fence. He didn’t want to turn the light on, leery of waking her (or if she was awake still, of startling her, because when he’d checked half an hour earlier she’d been lying there rigid, staring at the ceiling), so he tiptoed to the window and eased it shut. That was when he glanced over his shoulder and saw with a shock that the bed was empty. His first thought was that she must be in the bathroom, but he’d just been in the bathroom himself, brushing his teeth, and he’d gone directly from there into the bedroom, so how could that be? A tic of fear pulsed in his temple: he should have seen her through this, he realized that now, but he’d been thinking of Corey, of shielding him, of propping up the pretense that nothing was out of order.

But where was she? He stood there dumbly, staring out into the yard and the puddles of shadow that could have been anything, Corey’s bicycle, a wheelbarrow, the sprawled form of a human being—a female human being—lying there as still as death. He called her name softly, almost involuntarily—“Joanie?”—then went to the light switch and flicked it on. The room was empty. She wasn’t in the bed, wasn’t sitting in the armchair in the corner she liked to heap with her clothes and nest in when he and Corey were in the living room watching baseball, wasn’t—he jerked open the door—in the closet either. “Joanie?” he repeated and held his breath until the faintest moan came back to him in response, as if she’d dematerialized or shrunk down and crawled into the space between the walls.

He found her under the bed. Trembling. And when he took hold of her as gently as he could and tried to coax her out, she wouldn’t come. He was on his hands and knees, peering into the gap beneath the bed that was curtained all around with the satiny sheen of the bedspread and smelled of dust, of dust and her, crooning to her in his best imitation of Tim: “It’s all right, it’s okay, I’m here, don’t fight it, just give in, Joanie, give in . . . You hear me? Joanie?”

It seemed to take forever, as if they were a thousand miles apart, but he kept on whispering and crooning and drawing her out of herself until finally she said, “Fitz?,” and he said, “Yes.”