ANNIE WAS TYPING OUT SOME LETTERS FOR SAUL. After Lew’s disappearance—he had been gone for close to a month now—she had returned to the apartment and had taken over his job in the insurance agency, leaving Baby with her mom when she had to work. Her mom and dad wanted her to remain at home, but it would have killed her to stay any longer. She tried to go out as little as possible because she hated the questions and pitying looks. She saw Ruth, mostly, with whom she was collaborating on a children’s book. Nora, pregnant now, came around a few times a week. She told Annie that sometimes she couldn’t believe she was married to Walter, that sweet, near mute man with his sad denim-blue eyes and that hulking body he hardly seemed to know what to do with. She said this wasn’t how she imagined she would feel for her husband, and confessed that Raj was still on her mind all the time, though she had never sent him so much as a Christmas card and hadn’t invited him to her wedding, which she regretted. But it was a deep injury she felt, and in that sense Walter was perfect: a gentle presence, like a balm or a home-cooked meal or a quiet, temperate room. Annie wondered what Nora’s child would come to know: his father’s story, certainly, about how he had decided to marry Nora when he was thirteen; but not his mother’s, who had wished more than anything for that child’s father to have been another man.

Every day Annie expected Lew to reappear, which filled her with an intense and constant ambivalence: She wanted to know he was safe, desperately, but his obsession with Baby terrified her. A few times, frightened by how numbed she had become with grief for him, she had gone to the sinkhole. There she had felt him in the dappled light, the breathing trees, had imagined him emerging out of the water, sun and shadow giving form to his transparent nakedness. No, not naked but nude, as on the day he had cast her into the deep water so she would know that nothing lay between loving and killing, his cold limbs as hard as marble, his heart the stone heart of youth.