been escorted out — the mayor who would, in the following weeks, give many carefully worded statements and none of them would be adequate — the house went quiet.
The small boy, Mason, had been put to bed. Kate was somewhere down the hall. The kitchen held the specific quality of quiet that follows sustained noise, when the absence of sound has its own texture.
Daniel was at the kitchen counter. The Sprite bottle was still there beside him, where it had been since the lumberyard. He kept looking at it and looking away, the way you look at something that has become a container for too many things to process at once.
“I don’t know what any of this becomes,” he said.
“You don’t have to figure it out tonight.”
He nodded.
She asked the question. The one that had lived in her since the afternoon she turned around in a
