I did what I could, fixing concrete things that didn’t distract my mind from the vortex of questions. I had the locks changed and the alarms rewired and rearmed, for all the good those security features had ever done us. I bought a rosebush and stuck it into the space where the garden used to be. I hauled the lumber to the curb. And now Grace and I were waiting again. Just like we had been for days.

But no, it was more than waiting. I had summoned all my strength to talk to my mother, to tell her the barest outline of what had happened. And then I spent twice as long talking her out of flying to be with us like she had after Grace was born. “You can’t do anything right now, Mom. Nobody’s sick. We’re okay,” I said, even though I wished to my bones that she was right next to me, wrapping me in a hug, making it all go away. But I wasn’t a child. Letting my parents come down would only put more people I loved in an untenable position.

I called Michael’s parents, too, hoping to spare him some of the trauma of reliving the story. But of course it didn’t work. He was their only child. They had always been kind to me, they probably even loved me, but they needed to hear this from him. Which meant he had to explain to them why it wasn’t a good idea for them to try to travel, how he would be fine and how we had a good lawyer. And I listened as he minimized his own fear and pain to assuage theirs. When he hung up, I’d seen the shadow of his father’s oxygen tank and his mother’s tremor in the way he swiped a hand across his eyes.

Now he was at work, negotiating with his bosses to keep his job. “Don’t worry,” he’d told me. “It’s not like I have a public position, and what I do is pretty specialized.” But he had been worried, and so had I. People got blamed for things that weren’t their fault, people got fired without cause, and maybe his company wouldn’t want to be mentioned, even peripherally, in conjunction with something as awful as this.

“It’ll be all right,” I’d said as he left, and he’d nodded. But I couldn’t tell if he believed me or if I was just another burden, one more person whose feelings he was protecting, one more person whose needs were smothering his own.

So Grace and I were alone, and I had to shore up our home, make it safe again, try to block the holes and keep the water from rushing in.