I've gone very still.
I keep my face the way you keep a glass of water you don't want to spill, level, careful, nothing moving.
Inside me, something has dropped clean through the floor, because I know exactly the thing she's describing.
I know it from the inside of a locked room.
I know what it is to have your own brain turn into a country nobody can follow you into, and I know what it would have done to me if the people around me had handed me a Bible instead of a doctor.
She watches the fire.
I take a slow sip I don't want and hold it in my mouth a second, buying myself the time to put my face back where it belongs before she looks over.
"That's a hard thing to carry," I say. "For both of you."
She looks up at me then, and something crosses her face—surprise, and behind it a kind of relief so plain it's almost hard to look at.
"Most people say I should be grateful she's alive," she says quietly. "Or they tell me a story about somebody's cousin who got better. You just—said it was hard."
"Itishard."
"Yeah." Her eyes shine in the firelight and she blinks it back, the same as my mother does, the same set to the jaw. "It is."
We sit with it. The fire works at a log. The dog snores between us, oblivious, the only one of the three of us who's exactly where he wants to be.
I walk her to her door when the fire's low, Hoagie winding between us the whole way.
"Thank you," she says. "Again. You're going to think I'm the saddest woman in this town, two for two on dumping my whole heart on you by a fire."
"I don't think that."
"What do you think, then?"
I think she's spent her whole life loving somebody with a broken brain, and I'm a man with a broken brain who came out here to get away from his own, and the odds of the two of us ending up on either side of the same fence are long enough to keep me up tonight.
"I think your dog's got good taste in porches," I say.
She laughs, the real one, the one I heard through the trees before I ever saw her face.
Then she goes in, and the deadbolt turns, and I walk back through the gate into my own yard and stand a while in the dark.
Here's what I know about myself: I don't get to want things.
Wanting is how a man like me ends up in a locked room, or worse.
I gave that up. I made my peace with giving it up.
And then a dog came through a fence.
I take my pills. I lie down. The quiet settles over the house, and for once it doesn't feel like a thing I'm bracing against—it feels like a held breath, like the second before something starts.
I don't sleep for a long time.
I'm in more trouble than I've been in since I was discharged from the hospital.
CHAPTER FIVE
Sophie
