He began to laugh wildly. “Yeah, Ava. And then you came to my house.”

“I wanted to help you.”

He sat looking at her. Every breath she took an act of treason. “Oh, really?”

“Yes. I tried to help.”

“How’d he find us, then?”

She muttered, a strangled whisper: “You don’t know anything. You don’t know.”

“Forget it. I know how he found us.”

“You’re wrong.”

He didn’t answer.

“I wouldn’t hurt you,” she said.

“I don’t care. Whatever you say—it doesn’t mean anything to me.”

She turned her head and looked at him. Her hazel eyes. They said, You are betraying me. “Well. Good for you.”

He turned away, toward the window. Trying to calm himself. Suck of air. Fill the lungs, drain them. Something broken that could not be fixed. He opened the car door and got out.

Snow blew sideways and pelted his face. He turned away from it, holding up the hood of his coat.

“Where are you going?”

She had gotten out of the car too. Frosty bits of snow gusted, swirled in her hair. She stood there watching him. Wounding him with her eyes. Her coat blowing. My chest, he thought. My chest. He shrugged.

“Don’t do this,” she said, her voice hostile. Cold.

“You did this. Not me.”

He turned and started walking. The car door opened and slammed.

“Jack!”

“Just stop it.”

He looked back to see her standing there in the road, her body stiff, warlike. The briefcase at her feet.

“You forgot this.”

She pushed the briefcase across the snow to him.

They stood looking at each other. Everything so still. All of this like some ancient dream replaying. Constructed of air, soon to disappear.

So be it.

He picked up the briefcase. Then he stormed off, down the road.

XX

I am not like William Ernest Henley.

My head is bloody,

and it is bowed.

XIX

My father was right about one thing: What you put in your heart will make you hurt.

Right now, this heart is bleeding out.

And it hurts, it hurts.

But I am a stone. Smooth.

I roll with it.

Ava sits in the car with the engine idling and watches Jack walk away down the road in the snow. Holding the briefcase. The sweeping countryside beyond him shifts and warps in the snowfall. Stray trees standing out of the fields. Unmoving in the wind. She watches until she can’t see him.

She sits for a long time, looking down the road the way he has gone. No one comes. The air in the car is cold. The windows fog. She starts to put the car into drive, and then she doesn’t. She opens the glove box and inserts a battery into the cell phone. There are two bars. She sits and waits, the phone in her hand.

When she calls, he answers on the first ring. “Hello, bird.”

She says nothing.