He tried to think about morning. What to do. He wished he could take Matty to a library somewhere and read him a book or draw pictures on white sheets of paper, or maybe take him to see a matinee. Get popcorn and sodas. His eyes hurt, and he rubbed them with his arm. Overhead, the heater whirred into motion. Hissing softly. He lay in the dark and the blue, and he wished for a more beautiful world than there was.

In the night, he made up stories in which Ava wasn’t gone. She stood at the window, her shadow on the glass. She walked to him in just his shirt and pushed back the cover and slipped underneath and slid close to him. Her warm skin. The smell of her. He felt desire rising up, like famine. It would feel so good, to be touched by her. To be needed, to feel so needy. In the dream he pulled her to him. His hands on her hips and his nose in her hair. Both of them trembling. Both ready.

A little before dawn, he rose and left Matty sleeping and walked over to his coat on the chair and pulled the envelope from the pocket. He switched on the little lamp and sat and studied the handwriting. Scrawl of watersplotched words, slanting to the right. Abrupt letters. Sharp-edged. Just like him.

He tore open the envelope and unfolded the yellow paper inside. The page was ripped from a book: White Fang. It had a grainy texture. Two words were scratched lengthwise across the print in stark, angled letters. Words scratched deep and hard.

GO BACK.

XXXII

Where is the end and the start and the thing that causes the end that leads to the start? How do you tell where you were or tell the difference of where you are? Did everything lead to this moment? To this single grain of sand?

Ava gets ready, and then she waits. She sits on her bed. She listens. He will shower. Shave. Then he will make breakfast. Coffee. Eggs and bacon. Afterward, he will wash the dishes and utensils and dry each one and put them away in their correct places on the shelves. In the drawers. He will clean the marble counter with a microfiber towel.

Dishes clink. A cupboard closes.

She listens and waits.

And waits.

There. The front door closes. Seconds slip along, drop off. An engine starts. She moves to the wall by the window and shifts the curtains. Snow is dropping in fine cloud chunks from a cobalt sky. Below her, on the driveway, Bardem backs the Land Rover through the layers of white and shifts and heads away between snowflaked trees. She watches the flash of metal amid branches until the Land Rover disappears from view. She watches some more. Until she can no longer hear the engine. Until she is sure.

Silence.

Her blood. She feels it rushing. Rushing in quick, equal bursts.