Nora says, “Why did it wait?”

“What?”

Earlier, Nora found a small pair of surgical scissors on a tray. She’s using them now to cut Mia’s toenails. Their daughter sits on the operating table, her legs dangling, while Nora crouches before her, snipping at what look like thick curled talons. The clippings dirty the floor like wood shavings. “Why did this thing wait so long? Before giving her back to us? Why did we have to hurt for five years?”

“Five years,” he says and shakes his head, because it feels more like a century. His hair is graying. His liver hurts. He can’t come up with a reason to get out of bed most mornings. He lost his daughter, divorced his wife, and committed slow professional suicide. Time slows down when delivering its best poison.

“Jack?”

He realizes then she wasn’t asking a rhetorical question and venting her pain; she actually wants to know. He should have guessed. Nora irons her bedsheets and organizes her magazines alphabetically because she believes in order and precision. Everything needs to line up in her life and in a case. Cause and effect. Why her? Why five years? “Is it the rain again? Rain falls and people die? Rain falls and our baby lives? Rain falls and everything’s suddenly unfamiliar? Is that it? Because if that’s it, you’d think my tears would have done the job already.”

“Well, five years is nothing, really. There are plants older than the Bible. Stone is older than mankind.”

“It’s something to me.”

“I know. I’m just—”

“Explain the timeline, Jack. How did we get from that night to this day?”

He’s shaking his head as if he doesn’t quite believe it himself. “Something fell from the sky. Buried itself in the ground. And took her with it.”

“Why?”

“Well, I can only hypothesize. The rules of this world, after all, aren’t the rules of other worlds. On Titan, for instance—that’s one of Saturn’s moons—on Titan, there are rivers and lakes made of methane. It’s not a gas there. It’s a liquid. Instead of water, methane is the apparent source of life.”

“Stick with the rules of Earth,” she says. “Earth I understand.”

“There are two stages to most mushroom growth: The underground and the fruiting. The underground can take days or months or even years.”

“Years,” she says. “Five goddamn years.”

“Usually a spongelike layer forms beneath the surface. The fungus grows hidden in the substrate until it’s ready.”

“Ready for what?” she says.