He did so. They were both leaning forward as if they had stomachaches. Annie kept her eyes on Raj. She wanted to remember him as well as she could before he left. He seemed to understand this, submitting himself by looking off into the room. She felt a roiling pressure inside her. She wanted to be unreasonable, to tell him it wasn’t fair that he could just get to leave her like this. She wanted him to admit that he wouldn’t be happy for one minute without her. God, it felt as if it were happening even now: They were already becoming strangers, would soon have nothing to say to each other. She was just a high school graduate, married and pregnant at eighteen, and staying here. All at once she felt a little flicker of fury at him. Wouldn’t it be easier to cut it off now than to feel that connection slowly die? Foolish, hysterical thoughts, she knew. Bravely, in silence, he offered his vulnerable profile to her like someone yielding to being irrationally beaten. But yielding only because the other person—she—was essentially powerless.

At last he turned to her. “I’ll be back at Thanksgiving.”

She didn’t respond. If she didn’t say anything, he couldn’t go, and she wanted to hold on to him for just a little while longer.

“Remember I’m not without skills,” he said. “If you ever want me to perform a Fourier transformation on any ordinary differential equation, I’ll fix that right up for you, no charge.”

“Okay.” She stood up, her voice abrupt, almost cold. She couldn’t stand this anymore. “You write to me.” She embraced him.

“I’ll write you pronto pronto,” he said, and she couldn’t help but hear the upsurge in his tone, as if he were happy to be released.

She nodded and he was gone.

Lewis was updating Saul’s customer list, crossing off the customers who hadn’t paid their premiums for more than three months. Raj had gone upstairs to say goodbye to Annie.

The abrupt sound of a chair scraping across the floor above his head gave him a shock, and as he glanced down at the name he had just crossed off—Walter Spetz—he knew this man would die. He flung down the pen. Stupid. He examined all the names he had crossed off. How could he have forgotten who he was, the power he had? Dead. He had killed them all.