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I don’t say anything. I don’t tell him it’s all right, or that he’s safe now, or that he doesn’t need to be upset. I don’t ask him to be fine. I’ve watched men in my family pretend to be fine my whole life, and it never once helped any of them.

I reach over and take his right hand off the wheel. I have to peel his fingers loose one at a time. I hold it in both of mine, in my lap.

Then I take the left one too.

They’re ice cold. I hold them. I don’t rub them or squeeze them. I just hold them, and wait, the way he always waits for me.

It takes a long time. The sky goes from gray to white to the palest blue over the lake. The frost on the windshield starts to melt into little rivers. And slowly, slowly, the shaking eases, until his hands are just heavy and still and cold in mine.

“Come inside,” I say.

I don’t take him upstairs. I take him into the kitchen, because that’s where I always take people.

I sit him on a stool at the island. I take off his ruined jacket and drop it on the floor by the back door, beside Leo’s dog bed. I’ll burn it later. I roll his sleeves back, and turn on the tap at the big sink, and wait until it runs warm.

Then I wash his hands.

He doesn’t say anything. He just sits there and watches me while I work the soap between his fingers, over his knuckles, under his nails. The water in the sink turns pink, and then pale, and then clear. I dry them on a clean tea towel, one at a time, the way Mama used to dry ours when we came in from the garden.

When I look up, his eyes are wet.

I fill the new kettle. While it boils, I make toast with butter and a little honey, and put it in front of him with a cup of black tea. No lemon. He hasn’t eaten since yesterday morning. I don’t have to ask to know.

He eats it. All of it.

Then he puts his hand flat over the plate.

“Sit with me,” he says.

I sit beside him. Not across. Right beside him, close enough that our knees touch.

“I’ll tell you,” he says. “If you want to know. All of it.”

“I want to know.”

So he tells me.

He doesn’t soften any of it. The harbor. Rusakov’s men pouring out of the van, and Dasha in my car with a bullet through my hat, and Andrik’s shoulder. The phone exploding in his pocket. Leo on the roof.

Then he tells me about the boat.

I sit very still while he tells me about Geoff. What he said. Thirty-one years, and a pension, and a watch. Selin coming to him in March. The money. The front door in August.

“He asked me to tell you something,” Caleb says. “At the end.”

My breath catches. “What?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t finish.” His jaw tightens. “I told him no. Before he could. I’m sorry. I didn’t want him to have the last word with you. I didn’t want him to get to put anything in your head that he hadn’t earned.”

I look down at my hands.

He’d laughed when I saw the cake I’d made him, then ate half of it in one sitting and said nobody had made him a cake since his mother died.

He walked a man past me in my own kitchen, a week before Papa died, and smiled at me while he did it.

“Thank you,” I say quietly.

Caleb looks at me.