The Cedar Box

The first rule of picking a lock is that you cannot hurry it, and the first rule of being a prisoner is that you have almost no time.

She had learned the first rule in a basement in Jamaica Plain, six years ago, on a Tuesday night, in a class for the curious taught by a retired locksmith with a ponytail and a Boston accent you could have sanded a table with. There had been eleven students. Two software engineers, a woman who ran a bakery, a man who had locked himself out of the same Subaru three times, and Corinne, who had signed up because she was thirty pages into a Swedish novel about a locksmith and could not translate dyrka upp with a straight face until she knew what it felt like. She had been good at it. This had surprised everyone, herself most of all. Her hands were steady and she was patient and she had the translator’s oldest gift, which is the ability to feel for the place where a thing is holding on, and to ease it, without force, until it lets go.

You’re not fighting the lock, the man with the ponytail had said, bent over her shoulder, in the smell of coffee and machine oil. You’re having a conversation. You say: I’m here. Tell me what you’re afraid of.

She had laughed at the time.

She began on the Sunday night, in the dark, with the notebook on her knee.

The wire was the thing. A spiral steno pad is bound with a single continuous coil of steel the thickness of a hat pin, and it had never occurred to him, in all his thoroughness, to be afraid of it; she had watched him turn the notebook over in his hands a dozen times and run his thumb along the cardboard back and not once along the coil. It took her forty minutes with her fingernails and the edge of the washstand to work the last two turns loose, bending them back and forth until the metal gave, and then she had eleven inches of wire in her lap, warm from her hands. She folded it. A long arm, a short arm. She flattened one end against the iron leg of the bed until it was a hook the width of a grain of rice, and bent the other at a right angle, and ran her thumb along them, and sat looking at the two small crooked things lying in her palm as if they were the most beautiful objects she had ever translated.

She sewed them into the hem of her cardigan with a thread pulled from the quilt.

* * *

He kept the hour as a priest keeps an office.

Two to three, every afternoon, in the study. He brought her down the stairs with his hand under her elbow, and she went, in the borrowed light of the hall, past the red-eyed smoke detector and the three bolts and the cellar hasp; and she sat at the oak desk with the green lamp, with three hundred and eighty pages of the Skau squared before her, and bent her head, and worked.

It was a gift to be working. That was the part that infuriated her. After thirty days of pacing and counting she had sat down in front of a paragraph in which a retired detective stood at a window watching a ferry come in through snow, and her hands had gone out to it as a starving woman’s go out to bread. For ten minutes she forgot to be afraid. She forgot everything. She was only a mind in the act of finding the English for a Norwegian thought, and the whole wet gray weight of the last month had dropped away from her like a coat.

He sat in the doorway the first day, in the straight chair, with a book open on his knee. She could feel him not reading it. After a while, perhaps ten minutes, he rose and went away, and from the kitchen came the clink of a pot lid and the first low phrases of his humming.

That was the rule she made on the first day: the humming is the clock.

For as long as the sound went on, he was at the stove, stirring, chopping, thirty feet away with a wall between them and a knife in his hand and his mind on the onions. When it stopped, it meant he was listening; and when it stopped for longer than a breath, he was coming. She could work in the gaps. It was a bad clock, but it was the only one she had, and in the next forty-eight hours she did what a prisoner does with a bad clock, which is to fail and fail and fail again.

On Monday the hum stopped before she had the first pin set. On Tuesday she managed two, and the third sprang back in her fingers with a sound like a snapped twig, and she sat with her pulse in her ears and her eyes shut and heard him say, from the passage, “Cor? Everything all right?” and heard herself say, very clear, “I’m fine, I dropped a pencil.”

He stayed in the door a long moment. Then he went back to the stove.

She sat shaking with the padlock cold in her left hand. She had not dared take the box down. She did it all at the shelf, standing, with her back to the room, as though she were looking for a book: the wire in the keyhole, the tension at the bottom, the little ticking resistance of five pins asleep in their brass. It was an old lock, a good one, Norwegian, the kind a father buys for a thing he loves. She could feel each pin, one by one, like a row of small stubborn animals, and under her fingertip the slow miracle of the cylinder trying to turn.

On Wednesday it opened.

It was after the scan. That was the cruelty of the timing, or the luck: that she had lain on the bed with the blue curtain drawn while he moved the probe over her skin and the heart came up out of the static, galloping, and a face appeared on the screen, a real face, in profile, a little nose, a forehead like a small bowed head, and he had said, Look, Cor, she’s got your chin, with his voice breaking on it; and that she had looked, and wept, and taken his hand, and thought, in the cold clean part of her mind that never wept at all: Not yet. Not till the lock gives. Then he had walked her down for the hour, in a glow, with his arm round her waist, and gone to make a bean soup, humming a song with a long slow melody that she knew, God help her, that she’d taught him.

The third pin set. The fourth. She held the tension with a hand so steady it surprised her, and put the hook on the fifth, and felt it rise.

The shackle sprang.

It made hardly any noise. It was a small, soft, rich, brass click, like the sound of a woman closing her purse, and she stood there with the open padlock on her palm and could not, for a moment, move.

* * *

It was a plain box inside. A little lining of faded blue velvet, worn through at the corners. On top, lying on a folded square of chamois, a man’s wristwatch with a cracked glass and a cracked leather strap, stopped at ten past two; a tin of fishing flies, each tiny feather and thread of it pinned in a neat row; a Navy-issue pocketknife with a bone handle. Dad’s keepsake. He hadn’t lied. That was the first thing she thought, absurdly, with a pang of something that was almost tenderness. It was all here, just as he had said, the little shabby relics of a man who had died in a hardware-store lot at forty-six with a bag of washers on the seat beside him.

Beneath the chamois lay the rest.

She lifted it out by the corner. Under it, tight-packed, was a ring of keys, a huge one, three or four dozen, jangling and dull, like the ring of a medieval jailer; and every key had a tag. A small brown manila luggage tag, tied through the bow with string, and on each tag in the small, square, upright capitals she knew better than her own handwriting, a name and a line.

She read them standing up. She read them with her lips moving, the way she read any text in an unknown dialect, one word at a time:

CUMBERLAND — FRONT. (UNDER THE BIRDHOUSE. YOU HID IT FOR THE GARDENER.)

CUMBERLAND — GARAGE SIDE. (NEVER USED.)

SILVER HONDA — SPARE. (SOLD IN SEPT. I WAS SORRY. IT HAD A GOOD SOUND.)

PORTLAND APT 3B — DEADBOLT. (USED ONCE, JAN. 22. THE KITCHEN FAUCET YOU WROTE ABOUT. I FIXED IT. YOU NEVER KNEW.)

VOLVO — SPARE.

P.O. BOX 2214, PORT ELLIS.

STORAGE UNIT 14B, FALMOUTH. (YOUR MOTHER’S THINGS. I DIDN’T OPEN ANYTHING.)

She stood there with the ring in her hands and her mind gone white and clean as a page.

The kitchen faucet you wrote about. She had written about it, once, on a Sunday in January, in a post on a blog no one read, in a long wry paragraph about the drip in the new apartment that she couldn’t afford to fix and wouldn’t tell the landlord about because it was the only sound in the place. And a week afterward, on a Wednesday, she’d come home from the library and the drip had stopped. She had stood in the kitchen with her coat on. She had thought: the landlord. She’d been faintly, foolishly grateful. She had even, God help her, left a thank-you note on the fridge.

You never knew.

Her knees began to shake. She leaned on the shelf.

Further down the ring the tags grew newer. FENNIMORE — FRONT (×3). BACK. STUDY. CELLAR HASP. BEDROOM (BOLT). BEDROOM (BAR PADLOCK). BULKHEAD. And on a little steel ring, no bigger than a paper clip, a hex key with a tag of its own: STUDY — SASH SCREWS. (FOR THE WINTER DRAFTS.) And beneath those, tied with a bit of blue wool, a single key that she recognized at once: long barrel, worn brass, the initials D.W. scratched into the bow. TOWER. (SHE WORE IT ON HER MOTHER’S CHAIN. I TOOK IT BACK SEPT. 4. SHE WAS ASLEEP. I KISSED HER FOREHEAD FIRST.)

And at the very end, new, shiny, the tag still stiff: MARIGOLD — IGNITION. (FUEL: 2 GAL. I KNOW. I KNOW. I’M SORRY.)

She stood for a long time with her thumb on that last tag.

Then she saw the envelope.

It lay flat on the bottom of the box, under the keys, a big brown envelope of the cheap kind with a metal clasp, gone soft at the edges from handling. She drew it out and undid the clasp, and a sheet of glossy paper slid into her hand. It was a contact sheet. Thirty-six small frames in six rows, the kind photographers used to make from film, each one a tiny black-and-white image about the size of a stamp. She held it up to the window.

A silver Lexus. A girl in a camel coat. A man with his hand on the small of her back.

A man she had been married to for twelve years.

She knew every frame before she’d focused on it. She had seen twelve of them, in a plain brown envelope left on her doormat on a January evening, with no note, no name, no stamp. She had sat down on the kitchen floor with her back against the cabinet and looked at them one by one with a feeling like going through ice. She’d never known who sent them. She had lain awake for weeks wondering. A friend of Graham’s? A private detective, hired by the girl’s father? She had not cared, in the end. She had been grateful. In the worst months of her life, in the black cold of that winter, there had been one small hard piece of truth to stand on, handed to her by a stranger, kindly, in an envelope. She had thought of her unknown benefactor almost with love.

Frames 1 through 36. Twelve had a pale pencil check beside them. Twenty-four were crossed through with a single neat line, and beside several of them, in the margin, in block capitals:

TOO CRUEL.

HER FACE WOULD BE IN THIS ONE. NO.

TOO MUCH. SHE DOESN’T NEED TO SEE THAT.

THE GENTLEST TWELVE, said the line across the bottom. IF SHE HAS TO KNOW, LET IT BE THE KIND WAY.

She read it again.

The kind way.

The room did something. It tilted slowly, as a boat tilts, and straightened. She put the contact sheet down on the shelf with a hand that did not feel like hers, and stood with both palms flat on the wood, breathing through her mouth, and from very far away she heard the voice of the retired locksmith with the ponytail say: You say: I’m here. Tell me what you’re afraid of.

What she was afraid of was this. That for nine months she had told herself the story of her own life, how it had broken, how she’d been rescued by a stranger’s decency from a man who deserved it, how she’d come out of the divorce clean, and learned to live alone. And all of it, every grief, every victory, had been arranged. The photographs had not been luck. The kindness had not been kind. Someone had stood in a back alley with a long lens and decided how much truth she could bear, and chosen it, frame by frame, with a grease pencil. Someone had loved her so thoroughly that he had edited her life.

He ended my marriage, she thought. He did it as a gift.

And under the horror, like a fish moving in black water, a smaller and far worse thought. Would it have ended without him?

She did not know. That was the thing. She would never know. She had been given the knowledge, and the knowledge was a stone she could not set down, and the man who had given it to her was humming a long slow tune two rooms away over a pot of soup.

The humming stopped.

* * *

She did not remember closing the box. Her hands did it, as hands do, the lid first, then the shackle snapped home with the heel of her palm; she replaced the box on its shelf, a little to the left of the barometer, in the clean oblong where the dust had been, and was at the desk with the pencil in her fingers and her eyes on the page when his shadow came into the door.

“You’ve gone white,” said Emory.

“It’s nothing. A wave of it.” She pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead. “I think I stood up too fast.”

“Come away from the window. Come and lie down.”

“In a minute. Let me just — I’m in the middle of a sentence.”

He crossed the room. He did not touch her; he stood by the desk with his hands in his pockets, tall and warm and smelling of onions, and looked down at the page. She had written nothing on it. A blank half-sheet with a pencil on it, and a single English word printed neatly at the head: Ferry.

“Will you be all right?” he said.

“I’ll be fine.”

“Do you want some water?”

“Please.”

He went to get it. She sat with her hands pressed flat on the blotter, and under the left one, folded very small against her palm where the cardigan’s cuff covered it, were two things she had taken from the ring without the least conscious decision, as a thief takes a coin from a plate. A key with a stiff new tag. And a hex wrench no bigger than a paper clip.

MARIGOLD — IGNITION. (FUEL: 2 GAL.)

Two gallons. She had run the throttle on the Marigold herself, in July, with his hand over hers, and she remembered what the old engine drank. She thought: Two gallons is five miles, six if I’m gentle. She thought: Ned Pratt’s pots are set past the Ledges, and he hauls them every day by noon. She thought: Port Ellis is nine miles around the point.

And she thought, with a pure bright resolve that she had not known she possessed: It doesn’t have to be nine. It only has to be someone who sees me.

* * *

She went on Friday.

She chose the day with care, as one chooses a word: Friday the tenth, clear and cold and windless, with the sea like hammered tin, two days before the call, when he would be at once his most careful and his most distracted, because there was so much to do. He was in the kitchen by ten past two with the whole bright racket of a pot of soup, and a radio, a thing he never did, tuned to a station playing something with a banjo in it. She sat at the desk. She heard him open the oven. She heard the hum.

She counted a full minute. Then she stood, in her socks, and went to the window.

It was a tall, old sash with twelve small panes, the sort that stuck in damp weather; and he had screwed it shut in September, with four long brass screws through the meeting rail, which she had seen on her first day in the room and filed in the cold part of her mind under window: screwed. But a screw has a head, and a head has a slot, and the slot has a size, and what she had taken from the cedar box, in the half-second of a thief’s choice, was a hex wrench no longer than her thumb. She opened her left hand and looked at it, and saw that she had been lucky.

The brass screws were the sort that took one. She knelt at the sill and set it to the first, and turned, and it spun out into her palm in a whisper of oiled thread.

Four of them. She did it in a minute and a half. Her fingers ached. When the last was out she set her shoulder to the lower sash, and it shrieked in its frame, and rose; and cold air came in, tasting of seaweed and diesel and cut grass, and the radio in the kitchen played on.

She went out headfirst over the sill.

She landed in the flower bed on her hands and knees in the dead stalks of the asters. There was a small white square, she saw, stuck to the window frame at her eye level, with a tiny black wire running into the wall, like a stick of chewing gum. A draft-stop. Another. Another. She had seen them on every frame in the house for months and had never once put a name to the thing. Draft sensors, he’d said, in April, tapping one with a finger, they tell me when a window’s open. Old houses lose half their heat that way. She had thought it was sweet.

Magnetkontakt, thought Corinne, in a flat Swedish voice. You idiot. You made a glossary of the whole house and forgot the magnets.

She ran.

* * *

It was ninety-one steps down to the cove.

She knew because she’d counted them in July, going down with a basket in her arms, laughing, a man at her side; and now she took them three at a time, in her socks, on frost-slick granite, with one hand on the rope rail and her breath tearing at her chest. The air flew past. Below her the cove spread out, a cup of green water, and at the end of the stone pier, white and neat and gleaming in the sun, lay the Marigold.

She jumped the last four steps. The pier boomed under her. She ran the length of it, a stumbling run, and flung herself over the gunwale and into the cockpit, and went down on one knee in the smell of varnish and old rope.

The ignition was a small brass switch under the dash. She found the hole with her thumb. The key went in. She turned it.

Nothing.

She turned it again, and a click, and nothing. She thought wildly: The battery. She remembered the big red knob under the helm seat, and found it with her hand, a switch the size of a jar lid, and twisted it, and the dash came to life with a row of tiny orange lights.

She turned the key. The engine coughed, and caught, and roared.

It was the most glorious sound she had ever heard. It filled the cove. She half-sobbed, half-laughed, and threw off the bow line and the stern line with the practiced snap of a woman who had done it once, in July, under instruction, and shoved the throttle forward as far as she dared, and the Marigold gathered herself like a horse and slid away from the pier.

The water opened. The cove mouth came up, a gap in the rocks, a bright cut of blue. She kept the bow on it. The wake spread in a wide white fan behind her. Fifty yards, a hundred, the spray flying, the sun in her eyes, her hair streaming, and she was out, she was out, in the wide cold shining morning, and the boat sang under her feet.

She looked back once.

He was at the top of the cliff steps. A small dark figure against the sky. He did not run. He stood quite still at the head of the stair with his arms at his sides, looking down at the sea, and she raised her fist and shook it at him in a gesture so triumphant and so childish that she nearly laughed. Then she turned to face the open water, and for twelve glittering minutes she was free, with the point a gray smudge behind her and the whole wide bay ahead, until the engine began to cough.

It coughed again. It stuttered, caught, stuttered. The needle on the fuel gauge, which she had not looked at, which she had not even thought to look at, lay flat against the peg.

Two gallons, said a small, cold, reasonable voice. I know. I know. I’m sorry.

The engine died.

The silence was extraordinary. The Marigold slowed, and slowed, and settled, and rocked in the swell with a faint hollow knocking. Water slapped at the hull. A gull cried. She stood in the cockpit with her hand on the dead throttle and a hot hard pain in her throat, and looked back across four miles of glittering sea at a shore that was suddenly very small.

There was a locker under the port seat. She knew what was in it, because she’d checked in July, in a fit of cheerful prudence: life jackets, a horn, a coil of line, a bailing can. And a plastic box, orange, with a white cross, and a label that said FLARES. Her hands were not working properly. It took her three tries to break the seal. Inside was a stubby red tube with a cap and a pull-ring, and an instruction sheet, in English and French and a pictogram of a man holding it over his head.

She held it as high as she could. She pulled the ring.

There was a bang like a gunshot and a sizzle, and a red star climbed, trailing smoke, into the pale morning sky.

She fired another. And another.

It was eleven minutes before the Dolly P. came up out of the south, from the direction of the Ledges. She watched it come: a white lobster boat, low and broad, with a high bow and a yellow stripe and a stack of wooden traps lashed on the stern, riding the swell with that peculiar rolling grace of a thing built to do exactly one job. She stood up on the seat of the Marigold and waved both arms over her head and screamed.

* * *

“Mrs. Aldermere!”

Ned Pratt was sixty-seven years old, built like a mooring bollard, with a gray-white beard, a Red Sox cap, and a face the color of old rope. He cut his engine and let the Dolly P. drift down on her, and put out a fender, and came to the rail with a boathook. She had known him since June. He had given her a lobster in a paper bag, once, and a lecture on the correct way to drop a pot.

“Ned. Ned, thank God. Thank God. I need you to take me ashore. Not that shore. Port Ellis, the police, anyone. Please. He’s —”

“Easy, now.”

“He’s been keeping me in the house. He locked me in. For six weeks. He took my phone and he put boards on the windows and I swear to God, Ned, I’m not making it up, I’m not —”

“I know, dear. I know.”

His voice was so kind that she stopped.

He had come across onto the Marigold with the boathook in one hand, quick and steady for his age, and was kneeling by her. His big salted hand closed over her arm. He did not look at her like a man who was afraid of what she’d said. He looked at her the way Mrs. Dunphy had looked at her, over the sugar bowl, on a gray morning in September. With deep and pitying concern.

“Now, you’re all in a lather,” said Ned Pratt. “That’s all right. That’s what it is. My Mary was just the same with our second. She’d cry at the television, and she once swore blind that I’d hidden the car.” He patted her arm. “It’s the hormones, dear.”

“It isn’t hormones.”

“Emory’s told me. He’s been a saint about it. Mrs. Dunphy says you’ve been having a terrible time, and the poor lad’s out of his mind. He’s quit his shifts for you, you know. Quit the rescue squad. I’ve never seen a man so —”

“Ned —”

“Here he comes now.”

She turned.

The skiff was coming out across the bay under its little outboard, throwing up a curl of white. He wasn’t hurrying. He sat in the stern with one hand on the tiller, and there was a red bag in the bottom of the boat, and a gray wool blanket folded on the thwart, and as he came alongside the Dolly P. he cut the engine and looked up at her, and she saw on his face that expression she knew now better than any, the gentle, broken, apologetic patience of a man who has found his wife wandering the road in her nightgown.

“Cor,” said Emory. His voice shook. “Oh, Cor. You scared me half to death.”

“Don’t. Don’t. Ned, look at him. Look at his face —”

“I think we’d best get her home, lad,” said Ned.

“Thank you. I’m so sorry about this. She’s been —” Emory broke off. He put a hand to his mouth. “She’s been having these episodes. She gets so confused. The doctor says it’s the progesterone, it can look like — she took the boat, and I didn’t — I was in the kitchen, I didn’t know she’d —” He swallowed. “I’m sorry, Ned. I thought she was sleeping.”

“Don’t you apologize to me. You’ve got your hands full.”

Ned Pratt put an arm round her shoulders. His coat smelled of bait and tobacco and wool. She pressed her face into it for an instant, in an agony of disbelief, and felt him pat her, kindly, comfortably, like a horse, and thought that she would remember that smell for the rest of her life.

They towed the Marigold home between them, with the lobster boat at her bow and the skiff at her stern. It took forty minutes. No one spoke. She sat on the cockpit seat wrapped in the gray blanket, with a hundred yards of bright sea falling away on every side, and watched the cliff come up, and the tower on it with its white cap, and the gray house, and the long green lawn where a woman she barely remembered had once stood on a morning in March with a mug in her hands.

At the pier Ned shook Emory’s hand. He touched his cap to her.

“You look after yourself, Mrs. Aldermere,” he said. “You’ve got a good boy there.”

* * *

He did not shout.

He did not shout at the pier, or on the steps, or on the long walk up the lawn with his arm like an iron bar about her waist. He did not speak at all until they were in the kitchen, with the door shut and the soup, which had been bubbling for an hour, scorched to a brown crust on the bottom of the pot. He turned off the burner. He stood a moment with his hand on the knob.

“I forgot the stove,” he said. “I’m sorry. It’s ruined.”

“Emory.”

“I wanted it to be a good one. A good soup. I thought we might —” He laughed, one small, painful breath. “I was going to teach you the recipe. The fiskesuppe. I thought: she’ll want to know how it’s done.”

Then he took the notebook out of his back pocket.

She hadn’t seen him take it. It was the green steno pad, the spiral gap at the top, open to the middle, and he held it up between them in a hand that was perfectly steady. His thumb lay on a page of neat pencil Swedish, a page of alphabetical entries, a page of idle professional thoroughness.

Dyrk, said the line under his thumb.

“I started learning in September,” he said. “I’ve done it at night, in the oil room. I’ve been using the Lund-Berg dictionary and a grammar from the library at Rockland. I’m quite slow.” He turned the page. “Kamera (c.). In the thriller, a security camera. Cf. rökdetektor. There’s no camera in the book, Cor. I checked. I’ve read it. There’s no smoke detector at all.”

She stood very still.

“Nyckelknippa. On the left hip. You were such a good translator.” The warmth in his voice was terrible. It was, if anything, admiring. “It was the best thing I’ve ever read. I read it three times. I sat in the oil room with the lamp and I cried. I thought: she’s so clever. She’s so brave. And she’s still here.” His eyes were wet. “You could have left me a note. You could have said it to my face. You could have said, Emory, I’m still frightened, and I’d have — I’d have tried to —”

“You’d have let me go?”

He looked at her.

“No,” he said, quite simply. “But I’d have listened.”

He turned the notebook over and ran his thumb along the coil, and she saw him find the place at the top where two turns of steel were gone.

“I noticed on Wednesday,” he said. “I thought: I’ll see what she does with it.” His smile was small and sad. “I never found where it went. I’m not going to search you. I’d much rather you gave it to me.”

She said nothing. He waited a full minute, with the patience of the tide, and she met his eyes and did not look away; and at the end of it he nodded, once, as one acknowledges a move in a game.

He tore the page out, folded it with great care in four, and put it in his shirt pocket, and the notebook he laid on the counter. He took the Blackwing from his shirt pocket, still sharp, where he must have picked it off the study desk when he went to look for her, and laid that down beside it.

“I’m going to put the planks back,” said Emory. “Tonight. All of them. I wanted not to.” His voice cracked. “I’m going to take the pencils and the record player and the brush. I’m going to take the hour. I’m so sorry. I don’t see what else I can do. I gave you every chance. I thought I’d — I thought if I trusted you —”

“You didn’t trust me. You had sensors on the windows.”

“I trusted you with the rest,” he said.

It was the simplest, saddest, most terrible sentence she had ever heard. She stood in the scorched kitchen with the sun in her face and the sea in her ears, and saw, with total clarity, as though a cloth had been drawn from a table, all the edifice of it: the shutters, the hour, the record, the hairbrush, the first Wednesday scan, the hand in her hair. Not kindnesses. Not even bribes. Rungs. He had built her a ladder, and she had climbed it with her whole heart, and he had known, he had watched her climb, and he had let her get all the way to the top.

“There’s one more thing,” said Emory.

He had gone to the window. He stood with his back to her, looking out at the lawn, at the line of the cliff and the bright blue edge of the sea.

“Ned’s going to tell everyone. You understand? He’ll tell Mrs. Dunphy at the store, tomorrow morning, before eight. He’ll say you had a turn on the boat. He’ll say how well I looked after you. By Sunday the whole of Port Ellis will have heard.” He turned. “They’ll bring us casseroles. They’ll leave them on the step.”

“You planned that.”

“I didn’t. I swear I didn’t.” He shook his head. “I only knew that if it happened, it would go like that. That’s what it’s for, Cor. It isn’t the locks. It isn’t the boards. It’s that there’s no one left to tell. You could stand on Main Street and shout it, and they’d put their arms around you and bring you home.” He came across the kitchen, slowly, and stopped in front of her, and with infinite delicacy put out one finger and touched the tear that was running down her jaw. “That’s what I wanted you to know. Before Sunday. Before the call. Not because I’m angry. Because I don’t want you to hurt yourself again, thinking there’s a door.”

He drew his hand back.

“Mom wants to see your face,” he said gently. “You’ll want to look well.”