Still holding the journal open at the infamous passage, he read through it once more, then through the next—and last—entry, which had never much struck him before. Is there a single good man in the world, a single, good, feeling man in the world? A declension in tone here, a Doppler shift from approaching rage to receding despair. A real voice—Ruth’s—so clear she rose before him, vivid as life: in a Chinatown fish market, Gayle and Lulu mimicking crabs with their little hands over her liver-spotted arms; on the train station platform when he had left for Boston; kneeling in her kitchen garden, pushing Fifty-Three’s reckless snout away from her sweet peas. One memory after another, ending finally in that underworld where he had first encountered her, a dab of flour on her cheek, that woman—strong, sympathetic, guarded. Betrayed. One good man.

“Ruth.” Raj spoke her name softly. Again, louder. A boy once more, he wanted her back, to tell her he had stolen her journal, to see her hand upon its dark cover. But she, like Lew, was gone, in all her imperfection; gone, with all her secrets; gone, and nothing, it seemed, salvaged from that waste but this echoing little well of voices.

As he returned the journal, it struck him that one of his daughters—searching, perhaps, for her Christmas presents—would find it. In a hidden place she would read it, trembling, as if it held the secret, equally, of a past she would never know and a future she could hardly imagine. That seemed right to him.

He went into the bathroom, took Rachel’s card out of his wallet, and held it for a long while, his body suffusing thickly with regret until, fearing he wouldn’t, he finally flushed the card away and went down to the living room. He froze momentarily as a car approached the house, but it passed and suddenly he knew what he was going to do. He would surprise them—yes, he would jump out at them, a monster, from behind the coat rack in the hall. Annie and his daughters would scream, mobbing him, while Clay, in Lew’s body, with Lew’s face, would just smile at them all from far, far away.