“I keep trying to put it in a small box. I have to close the box and sit on the lid, but it keeps thumping underneath me. There’s our whole lives before, then ten minutes in your kitchen, now the rest of our lives. Those minutes were totally anomalous to everything else. Unless we go through a third world war or an antibiotic-resistant plague, nothing like that is going to happen again in our lives. So it wasn’t a learning experience. All I’m hoping now is that it doesn’t color us, and I’m beginning—what you just showed me—I’m beginning to feel that’s what’s happening.”

“Well really, though,” Neale says. “How can it not?”

“Who do you think they were? Sometimes I try to imagine them in their life. Maybe it was so hard it bent them. Maybe they were terribly abused as kids.”

“No, no. You need to get off that train of thought. That’s the train that takes you to second thoughts. Rue. You don’t need to muddy up things with rue. You don’t need to think maybe you could have just knocked him out so he could have come to and gotten into prison counseling and back on the straight and narrow. Because what if he came back to consciousness? He was quite huge, as you might recall. You were only able to kill him because you caught him from behind. And by surprise. I just don’t let my thoughts branch out. Marlene says I need to keep my thoughts on it circumscribed by those minutes, that room, that for now it’s best to confine it.”

“Does Marlene know about the gun?”

Marlene is the therapist Neale has started seeing. An old friend of Neale’s mother. She ran Rose’s consciousness-raising group in the ’70s. Cate knows she should want Neale to get professional help, but in fact she resents the fact that Neale is talking to someone about what happened, but not talking about it to her.

In Home Depot, Neale points to a small square of tile on a thick page filled with samples. “What about this?”

“There’s multicolored, then there’s dog vomit.”

“Yes, this one here is called Trip to the Vet.” This is the salesperson, Darlyn. She’s amused by the idea of a dog-vomit palette. The three of them are in a tight huddle over the sample books, and Cate can feel a dry heat coming off Darlyn, just wafting around in the confined air. She finds this comforting because it’s something she’d notice in regular life, her life before. Darlyn pulls a big sample book out of a slot and opens it. “Here are some confetti patterns in circus colors. And here’s one with yellow-red-blue.”