I thought I heard Sarah say, “Daddy.” When I turned, however, she was still focused on the dog and didn’t show any sign of having even noticed me. That word from her lips had been the most beautiful music of my life, and now I knew that I would probably never hear it again.

Meg returned after only a couple of hours. We spent a quiet day with our daughter. I told her about the microwave, and we now knew we could not leave Sarah alone even for a minute. We ate. We went to bed. We, Meg and I, lay side by side, with nothing to say. There was nothing to say. Until Meg said the right thing.

“I love you,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said. “I love you too.”

In my dream, Hilary Gill was smoking a cigarette and clearly not enjoying it. She grimaced with every drag and coughed when she exhaled blue clouds that sank to her skirted knees. Perhaps the most significant thing was that she was alive, a fact that was not lost on dream Hilary Gill.

“Why a doornail?” she asked. She was fiddling with a laptop computer on her lap, trying to adjust the screen so that she could see.

“What?” I asked.

“A doornail? What’s a nail have to do with death? ‘Dead as a doornail,’ they say. What is a doornail, anyway?”

“It’s a long nail that was once used to fasten the parts of a door together,” I said. I was seated at a table not far from her. I was surprised to find myself talking.

“What’s it got to do with dead?” she asked. “Or death?”

“It was driven all the way through, and the point was pounded over and back into the wood, so that it could not be pulled out, and so it was called ‘dead.’”

“That’s stupid,” she said.

“Well, there you have it.”

“Fieldwork is the best part, don’t you think?” Hilary Gill asked.

“The best part of what?” I asked.

“Of what we do. Oh, the teaching is okay, a little tiring, boring.

The administrative shit is easy enough but mind-numbing. The committee work is something Stalin dreamed up, I’m sure. And the publishing just to publish, that’s sick. Who the fuck cares about any of this shit? Who does it make a difference to?”

“I suppose. It’s all part of a conversation, isn’t it?” I asked. I felt like a wide-eyed kid, and perhaps I was.

Hilary Gill laughed. “I never pegged you for being so naive.” She pulled long and hard on the cigarette and made that face. “Sorry about your daughter.”

I shrugged.

“You should have fucked me while you had the chance.”

“What?”

“You should have fucked me. Then right now you could really feel like shit, even more than you do. You’d be losing your child and you’d feel guilty for driving me to suicide by fucking me and then by not fucking me again. A perfect guilt storm.”