Mano set her face to the wind so that the tears in her eyes could be for anything or nothing at all. She took deep, slow breaths. She tried to match the pace of her own breathing to the movement of the linden branches in the gusts. As a young girl, she used to pretend to call Ruth and Teresa on a toy phone that had a working rotary dial. Come back, she'd tell them, come home. After a while, she'd realized that painting was a less lonely way to talk to herself. Looking at Keith just then, seeing all the ways he would never listen to her, she realized it still was.

“I haven't had any luck seeing this comet,” Keith said. “All this goddamn cloud cover.”

“Well, it's up there,” Mano said. If there was no more Rick, and no more Keith, if her life was now her own again, and of course it was, who else had it ever belonged to, then she could be certain about what to do next.

Mano went back to Ruth's and called the paper, told them everything she knew and some things she suspected, that Lloyd was covering up for the construction company, that the regulators had not been called. Her next call was to Lloyd himself. “You'll want to fire me soon enough anyway,” she said, “so to save both of us the trouble, I'll just quit.” Ruth made bottomless pots of coffee, gloated in insufferable ways when she beat Mano in double solitaire, gave her the number of a good divorce attorney. Drop Rick. Mano did not return Keith's calls. Drop Keith.

Weeks later, the paper finally ran an article about the fish kills, except they only wrote about one, as though it had only happened one time. The article was sympathetic to the construction company—an investigation had shown that all the required mitigations were in place, made the chemical spills that dropped the river pH so much it killed the fish seem like something mild and inevitable, a regrettable but ultimately harmless mistake. Lloyd was highlighted with a reassuring quote, “The fish we put in the tank the next day lived, are still alive. Whatever was in the river, it was a very temporary state. It flowed away as quickly as it flowed in.” Various state and local authorities had collaborated to find nothing—no systemic problem with construction near the river, no lingering negative environmental effects. Lloyd and Keith were commended for their quick-thinking actions to preserve the integrity of the city's drinking water.