He put his ear to Roy’s gaping mouth. Nothing, he thought, but listened longer. Did he hear something?

A shadow fell into the hall from the foyer.

“Oh my God!”

Donna and Carly rounded the corner into view.

“Oh my God,” Donna said again.

Jonathan shook his swimming head to clear a path for something to say. “He took some pills. A lot of pills. Get Carly out of here. Take her to Ada’s.”

Donna’s hands were shaking as she keyed into her phone. “Oh, God. I’ll call 911.”

“No!”

Donna’s eyes snapped up from her screen. Carly was looking from Roy’s lolling head to Jonathan’s face. He was mesmerized trying to know how she was reading this.

A small wounded sound parted Carly’s lips. “Oh” was all she said.

“Don’t,” said John. “I already called. They’re on their way. Just get Carly out of here. She doesn’t need to see this.” He pulled his gaze away from his stepdaughter’s, breaking the spell for himself.

“And Donna,” he called to her as they turned for the door, Donna steering Carly by the shoulders and Carly looking back at the tangle of Roy in Jonathan’s arms. He found a sliver of himself still within reach, still right there in his voice when he needed it. “Come right back. Please come back. I need you.”

•  •  •

He listened for the thunk of Donna’s car doors. He didn’t trust that dying had truly done its job, that it wasn’t still there, lingering, waiting to see if it would be more fun to leave without what it came for and watch chaos take over. He waited to hear them back out of the driveway and checked that they’d rounded the corner before he took a pillow from the sofa and held it over Roy’s face for a long, slow count. It felt like two hundred plus forever. Counting kept the fear at bay, kept him from rushing it. He had to be sure. Now that Donna and Carly had been there, it could only be this way.

Roy never moved. He never made a sound. Jonathan found no pulse.

Jonathan felt lighter. Some of the painkillers had definitely gotten into him. There was a little of the gilded happiness that lived somewhere in the chemistry of the medicine, a surge of well-being that didn’t make any sense in illness, or after being cut open and sewn back together. Or in the postglow of holding a pillow over a guy’s face either.

But it wasn’t half-bad. And it was twice as useful as even that. He couldn’t feel a thing. No nerves at all.