It was six in the morning a week to the day after Oliver’s funeral. Ruth was sitting with a cup of coffee in the swinging bench out on the back porch, the sun just broaching the tree line. She wanted time to herself. Haig made her uncomfortable. He seemed to feel that Oliver’s death had established a special intimacy between them, itself the vanguard for other feelings that might naturally arise between a man and a woman. It was clear that the thought of stepping right into his brother’s life was taking hold of his imagination. He had begun to talk about how much he hated his job and the city; that his wife was no longer the woman he had married. He had also started to compliment her gratuitously. He had asked, the previous evening, if he could feel her muscles, of all things. She had been brusque. No doubt he thought her a hard nut. And cold. She had not cried once. Then there was the question of that boy, who crept around like a mouse and still hadn’t uttered a single word.

She just wanted to be alone. Oliver had been perfect, his past and all his unhappiness sealed as she had sealed hers. He was like a dream figure, endlessly approaching across vast distances. Haig was shocked by how little Ruth knew about his brother, but they had both preferred it like this, living in the present, as needful and mysterious to each other as parent to child and child to parent. Whatever was inside them, however terrible, was transforming, under the pressure of hard work, silence, and tenderness, into something resembling love. The cost, though, was that they were never in love, since they existed for each other too obliquely. Love occupied the spaces between, worried the edges of their consciousness like a song neither could quite remember.

More confusing still, it was Haig’s impending visit that had provided whatever killed Oliver with enough traction to get out of the pit in which he had kept it trapped all these years. He became increasingly restless as the date of his brother’s arrival approached. He had suffered bad times before, like the night when he woke her up and asked her to hide the old carving knife, its blade lean with sharpening, which he couldn’t stop thinking about. And just hours before he did it, Oliver revealed there was a voice in him that told him to do terrible things, and whenever he learned to fend it off, it would transform and reemerge. It had become like her voice—Your voice, Ruth, he said, but awful, cruel. She wanted to tell him she knew whose voice this was, her mother’s, and realized for the first time how vulnerable their particular intimacy had made them: Without the warding gestures of language, the prophylactic of confession, they had caught each other’s secrets like a virus.

The back door opened, shocking her.

“Morning,” Haig said.

She tightened her shawl around her neck. “I hope I didn’t wake you?”