I opened the door. Then I paused, turning back in the doorway. “You left something out, Nora. Things I haven’t let myself remember for years. My father was a good and decent man. He never made a promise—no matter how small, or how busy he was—that he didn’t keep. He never lied, and hated lies and liars. We played baseball. He was tall and slim and had this way of looking at people, even the priest, that said he saw them through their words. He was proud. He even walked proud into Mass, kneeling so quick and graceful by our pew that he was up in an instant. He seldom smiled, but when he did it was bright and sudden, and without knowing it he made people want to be like him. We—my mother, Brian, and I—lived on his strength. And when he died, my mother found her strength in hating him for that, and Brian in God, and I became someone I was never meant to be and made a mess of Krissy’s life, and now that’s mine to face. But there’s the other thing.”

Nora looked up. “What’s that?” she asked.

“My father was right. Tyrell killed the woman.”

“Oh God, Adam.”

I touched her cheek. Then I turned and walked to my car through the rain, to find Kris Ann.

The skies had turned black and slantwise rain battered my hood in the metallic beat of the night seven years ago, when I knew how I’d begun to lose her.

We had come back late from a movie and parked at the end of Cade’s driveway in a cocoon of rain and darkness, not wanting to go in. Thin vapor from our breathing glazed the windshield. Through it, the house was vague and dark and massive, its single light a blur of yellow from Cade’s bedroom. Kris Ann and I slid down in the seats, faces turned to each other, debating whether she would come to my room again. “But it’s unnerving,” she said, “like making love in a fire drill.”

I grinned in the dark. “It develops intense concentration and singleness of purpose. Someday our children will be banging on the bedroom door demanding water, and we’ll have either learned to concentrate or else—”

“Our children,” she smiled, “are one thing. My father is something else.”

“He is that.”

Her smile faded. “What are you going to do about his offer?”

“I don’t know. We’ve been planning on Washington, after all. Of course it’s a fine firm and a better start in some ways: more money, a good practice if I make partner. I suppose our life might be easier.”

“What about that apartment in Georgetown we were going to find?”