It was the night before New Year’s Eve. Mr. Barlow and Em would be driving back to New York in the morning. Em and I were doing the dishes after dinner. Grace was lying down on the couch in the living room; we could hear her telling stories about the elder Barretts, her parents. “My father has to put his pajamas on before the ball drops—you’re lucky you’re leaving,” Grace was saying to the snowshoer. I knew another reason Grace was relieved that Elliot and Em were leaving. Grace was afraid her father might ask Em about the Gallows Lounge shooting. Grace knew that Em didn’t like to be asked about it. I didn’t like imagining how Em might pantomime it. I only knew what Elliot Barlow told me, about how Em’s third-person novel was going. I wished Em would send me some pages; that was all I was thinking. From the kitchen, Em and I could hear Molly and my mother laughing.

“Oh, Arthur isn’t so bad, Grace—you don’t know what it’s like to have a father in diapers!” we heard my mom say.

Em and I had loaded the dishwasher and had moved on to the pots and pans; I was washing, Em was drying, when I felt her hand slip in and out of a front pocket in my jeans. The folded piece of paper she put in my pocket made a crinkling sound when I touched my jeans with the knuckles of my wet hand. I was reaching for a dish towel to dry my hands when Em crossed her index fingers, giving me the X sign. I had to wait to read what she’d written till Em and Mr. Barlow went to their bedrooms, and Grace was in the bathroom. “I hear you’re going to Aspen and the Jerome,” Em wrote me. “I hope you don’t have a lot of explaining to do when you come back. You have a very nice wife, you know. Grace is also a very good editor, but don’t let her be your editor,” Em had written.

There would be no way to be alone with Em, or to have a private conversation with the snowshoer, before they went back to New York the next morning. I thought about writing Em, but I wrote to Elliot Barlow. I assumed my mother must have said something about my going to Aspen and the Jerome, and the little English teacher had mentioned it to Em. “What does Em know about Grace as an editor—why is Em even thinking about Grace, editorially?” I asked Elliot.