“When I was a kid, he used to read to me. Before everything fell apart. We went to the library, or sometimes he’d take me to this bookstore where I could pick any book I wanted for a quarter. He bought my favorite book there: White Fang. I was just a kid, but I begged him to read it to me. He did too. That summer before they took him. He read it over and over. He told me everything I ever needed to know was in that book. He said, ‘The wild lingers in you, Jack.’”

For a moment, he became inarticulate in his effort to express himself. His heart. What dark lived there.

“I went to see him in prison,” he said. “I asked about the money he stole. Where it was. I had to take care of Matty.”

He searched her face in the twilight for some sign of aversion or disgust, but there was none. He went on: “He wouldn’t tell me where he hid it.”

She waited, watching him.

For a few heartbeats, he watched her too.

The things she made him feel. As though he were enough.

“He gave me a clue, though,” Jack said. “I didn’t know it at the time. Then he sent me this.”

He unfolded the page and showed her.

Quiet: The room was made of it.

“Go back,” Ava said softly.

She said the two words like a question. Or like the words of a spell.

The page in Jack’s hand trembled, and he folded it closed. “Dad would read White Fang to me out in our barn. He had this spot with a couch and a Coke machine. We sat on the couch, and he read to me.”

Recognition dawned on her face. She looked as if she was being scraped by the winds of a storm. “You want to go back.”

His voice rose on a peak of feeling.

“The money’s there.”

On the other bed, Matty stirred. Jack stood—something inside him screwing tighter and tighter—and went to Matty and sat on the bed and tucked the blanket around him. He could feel the heat of Ava’s attention on his back. He glanced at her briefly, half afraid, as if a longer look might result in a burn. He didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything.

Silence.

“The police would have looked,” she said.

“They did. They tore the house apart. The barn too. But they didn’t find it.”

She shook her head.

“It’s there,” he said. “I know it.”

Silence, all the deeper. It was the kind of silence that lovers share in a disagreement. Unspoken words between them.