Chapter Six

It had taken John Hawthorne nine years to introduce himself, so Mariah was not alarmed when things moved slowly between them. After filling a shot glass with Rick Lot’s blood, he walked her home from work. He walked with her again the following evening, and the evening after that. On the fourth, she invited him inside. He declined, as she had suspected he would, but their late walks continued as Wrightwood’s mild winter carried them into the new year. Even on those rare days when the sky whitened with snow and the air sharpened on the San Gabriels, Mariah left her car in her driveway and went to the Trotter on foot, so she’d have a reason to return the same way. They did not hold hands or stroll so close their arms brushed, and what little talking they did never lasted long. That was okay with Mariah. She was used to silence, had spent much of her childhood in its company after her mother passed and her father turned to liquor for companionship. His silence had been wide and blue with the occasional gray spot, like the big emptiness that looked down upon the desert. John’s silence was flinty and full of edges, the kind that might strike a spark if you weren’t careful. But it was comforting in its own fashion, as a sleeping bag laid on hard ground can be comforting after too many years on a mattress. She enjoyed the shape of John’s silence and the way it contrasted her own, which sometimes felt restless and strange and yearning. There was an open space inside her, a place where the wind never stopped blowing. Its gusts would keep her awake late at night, and whenever she looked at the horizon from up high, she had the feeling—frightening but also thrilling—that she could simply drift away. Being with John did not calm this space; it helped her define it, understand it. With him, she felt closer to herself.

By spring their walks through a dark, dozing Wrightwood had become as normal (and as necessary) as breathing. But the walks always ended the same, with John nodding his goodbye and Mariah alone on her doorstep . . . until one weekend in March when he asked her as he was leaving if she might care to have lunch with him on Sunday. There’d been hope in his voice, but also regret, already regret, and she’d told him that lunch would be fine, on the condition that they eat at his house. She hadn’t seen his place, and the thought of going to him for once, walking in through his door, seemed only fair. The nod he gave to her, before heading up the road to whatever obscure path he took home, did not feel quite as much like a farewell that evening.

They ate plain barley on dry spinach and washed it down with warm tap water. She complimented his cooking. He told her he had lots of practice. When the sun changed windows, dropping behind the tree line and soaking the woods in honeyed light, she said, “I’m not leaving, just so you know.”

“Okay,” he answered.

What happened next happened slowly, like everything that had happened before, and ended in the bedroom where Mariah now lay, in a pair of oversized sweatpants and a flannel pullover thick enough to serve as a blanket. She was tired from the walk back, even though John had carried her the whole way without once setting her down. She knew they must have passed some horror out there in the night, but all she could remember was a gentle rocking, a shaded, swaying time outside of time.

John sat on the bed’s edge in a clean gray chambray shirt, his back half-turned to her, his hands resting in his lap. The blood had been washed off, except for a few spots around the knuckles and a faint residue on the fingernails. She’d felt no surprise seeing it there. With John Hawthorne, you could always expect a little blood.

“What are you thinking?” she said.

He took so long to answer she began to think he wouldn’t. “It should be colder,” he said. “That’s what I’m thinking.”

She sat up on an elbow. “How do you mean?”

“Before the sun came up this morning, before everything happened, the thermometer on my back porch read 48 degrees. I remember that number. It stuck with me. I close my eyes and I can see right where the mercury sat, which is just the thing. The mercury’s hardly any lower now. A degree. Maybe even less. I stood out there and watched it, and I waited to feel . . . something.” He cracked his right wrist, and a crescent of dead skin—a half-moon scar—bulged briefly on his forearm. “Where I grew up, warmth was hard to find after September. Winter started cutting its teeth long before fall was finished, and come November the air had a bite you could feel indoors. Some of that was due to poor insulation in the walls and lack of heating—my father considered such things to be silly luxuries—but mostly the cold was just mean. Once it locked its jaws on our lonely little corner of the world, it didn’t let go until you forgot that things had ever been any other way.”

Mariah pulled the bed’s single thin sheet higher up her body. “You’ve never mentioned your father before.”

“Nothing worth mentioning.”

There, Mariah thought, is a lie if I’ve ever heard one.

“Well,” he went on, “I was standing outside looking at the thermometer, but what I was really doing was waiting to feel that bite in the air. The one that’d tell me winter’s on the way and we’d all better watch out, because this winter is here to stay. But I felt nothing. Not so much as a nibble. And I can’t wrap my head around it. Can you?”

“I’m still wrapping my head around that,” she said, nodding toward the dark window. There was no curtain over it. There had never been need for one, considering John was not the type to sleep past sunrise. It dawned on Mariah, with a tickle of dread, that no window would ever need a curtain again—not to keep out the light, anyway. Then it dawned on her that the phrase ‘dawned on’ derived its meaning from the sun, and she thought, how much have we lost? How much, if anything, is left?

The weight of the question made her head heavy. She gave up trying to hold it and laid it down on the pillow.

“Maybe it’ll start slow,” John said after a pause. “Something to do with the atmosphere, and how the air around Earth holds in heat.”

“The greenhouse effect.”

He looked at her.

“Don’t act so surprised. I went to school, you know. I’ve even got the bachelor’s degree to prove it. It’s collecting dust in my closet.”

“I’m not surprised. Just looking. I can do that, can’t I?”

His eyes held hers, and she was struck again by his handsomeness. Not in the easy-to-look-at kind of way, like most men with good jaws and strong cheekbones. John was handsome in the way a mountain range is handsome, high up around the cruel, white peaks where nothing but snow can survive.

“Yes,” she said. “You can look.”

He did. Then he said, “The greenhouse effect. Yes, maybe that’s it. Get a pot of water boiling, turn off the heat but leave it on the stove, and it’ll stay warm for some time. I can’t say if that’s right for what we’re talking about now, but it feels right to me, or close enough. Maybe the sun’s left enough behind to last the world a day or two, and the warmth out there is just its ghost. Maybe.”

“But?”

“But we shouldn’t have to ask these questions in the first place because the sun shouldn’t be able to die. Not in the time it takes to snap your fingers. The sun isn’t some circuit tied to a kill switch. It’s a star, and stars are bright because they’re hot, and they’re hot because they make heat. Even if its engine suddenly quit—and I don’t know if it could do that either—the sun itself wouldn’t go dark just like that.”

“That’s how it happened?” Mariah asked quietly. “Just like that?”

John nodded.

She shivered. It was bad enough looking out and seeing the night when it had no business being there. Words could not express the pure wrongness of it. But to actually witness the night fall? To watch the light leave the morning and feel the dark around you, on you, where sunshine had rested only seconds ago? She was not sure she’d have lasted through that. Or that she’d have wanted to. “What then?” she asked, mostly for the distraction. “Say the sun’s engine did stop running, like you said. What then?”

“It’d cool down bit by bit, getting dimmer and dimmer over days and months and years until . . . again, I don’t know. My brother could set us straight on the account. He’s better at knowing the insides of things, making sense of the stuff that can’t be touched. Me, I’ve always done most of my thinking with my hands. I have to hold something to understand it.”

“Your brother . . . was he also not worth mentioning?”

“I guess I haven’t talked about Marshall either, have I?” John said, raising one eyebrow slightly. “We don’t speak much anymore. He used to write now and then, though, from his place in the Rockies. Not big on technology, Marshall, by which I mean he doesn’t have any. Unless you count the electricity he uses to read by, and even then I bet he’s got a few gas lanterns to help him get by in a pinch. He’s probably reading some dusty classic right now, just like he would at any other time.”

“How’d he get his hands on a copy of my college degree?” Mariah asked.

John smiled—a rare thing. It did not last long. “Marshall is . . . Marshall. He’ll be there, up in that house of his. If anybody can shrug off something like this and go about things as they were, it’s him. He’s got a cellar of goods he keeps stocked and a cabinet of scotch big enough to nurse until the world ends. He won’t step foot out of the mountains, and if he does it’ll be to take a pass around in that cute one-engine plane of his. He keeps her runway and engine warm, his Lily.”

“He named his plane after a woman?”

“No. After the flower. Marshall doesn’t have much romance in him.”

“What’s special about a lily?”

“He told me it represents death, and he’d like to think of death as something with wings that takes you away.”

“Sounds pretty romantic to me.”

“I suppose it does.”

Something flapped into the windowpane. They both looked up for a moment, waiting for whatever had struck the glass to take off again. It didn’t.

“Will you try to reach him?” she asked. “Your brother?”

“No way of reaching Marshall now unless I go to him, and I have strong doubts that getting there would be easy. Or that it would be wise to try. Starting at this point, miles aren’t measured the same. Before, you’d be looking at a two-day drive. One day, if you really pushed it. Now . . . it’s hard to say what the journey would hold now. What kind of places it might take you.” John paused, staring out into the night. At last he shrugged. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. I don’t think Marshall would care to see me on his doorstep.”

Mariah might have pressed further, if she’d thought pressing would do any good. But she knew a dead end when she saw one, and besides, she was tired. So, so tired. Her eyelids drooped, closing her into an amber darkness graced by the bedside lamp.

John spoke again. His voice had changed in some subtle way; new currents, low and strange, moved beneath its surface.

“What if it’s something else?”

“What if what’s something else?”

“What if the sun didn’t go out? What if it’s something else?”

She opened her eyes. John remained sitting with the same still, squared posture, and yet he could not have looked more different. Afraid, she realized. He’s afraid.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” he said, after a long while. “Try to get some rest.”

He got up, his back turned, but he did not move. His shadow stood beside him on the wall, and Mariah had the brief, unsettling feeling that he and his shadow could have swapped places and she wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. He wasn’t all the way there. Something was missing. Had always been missing, as long as she’d known him.

Finally he said, “I’m sorry about what happened between us.”

“Which part?”

John left without answering, and Mariah figured his silence was answer enough. She lay in the bed where they had once slept together, on a night so much simpler than this, and she walked a hand onto her stomach, thinking of what they had made that night, what was now growing inside her.

✽✽✽

John stood outside the door, his hand on the knob, listening to Mariah breathe. His mother’s old lullaby stirred inside him again. Good night, he thought, good night, the stars are out, the moon is bright . . . except the moon wasn’t bright. The moon only shined if the sun shined on it. Its cool white glow was nothing but secondhand starlight reflected off a barren, chalky landscape. Without the sun, the moon was just another dark rock lost in space.

His hand slipped from the knob.

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He turned away.

The hallway was dim, but he could still make out the smooth, round indentation in the wall across from the door. As always, when his eyes passed over that spot, something inside him paused. There, said a mild voice. It happened there. He ran his fingers over the caved plaster, thinking of the moon’s surface, of craters. No memory came with the touch, no emotion, only a sharp prickle of the cold that slept within his bones. He went down the hall, carrying that smooth, round crater in his heart. As he stepped into the living room, he looked out at the hill across the way. No lights were on at the Krauter’s household. Nicholas’s father was not back yet . . . if he was ever coming back. John hoped he had done right, tucking the boy into bed and leaving that note on his door. He thought he had done right. But the margin between cruelty and kindness was sometimes thin, and sometimes there was no difference at all.

He continued through the living room, and because he was looking outside for a light, he failed to see the smaller red light blinking on his answering machine. He turned the reading lamp on in his office, which in truth was not an office at all but a closet where he stored the few things in his life that he could not bring himself to throw away. On one wall was a bookcase (bare except for an atlas and a few tomes on subjects like mechanics, carpentry, and steelwork) and in the corner was a file cabinet containing four decades’ worth of taxes, all ordered in plain manila folders. There was nothing else in the room but stale carpet, a wooden chair, and a writing desk on which nothing had ever been written.

John sat down and opened the bottom drawer. Inside rested a tidy pile of letters, all sent from the same address, all unanswered. He took out the top one, the last one. He removed the pages tucked inside the envelope and smoothed them against the desk. The letter was dated almost ten years ago, but the ink still looked wet.

Brother,

It’s snowing as I write this. The flakes are as large as my palms, and the sound of them is like soft hands padding against my window. I catch myself looking through the window to see if you’re there. Do you remember that night—the night we met them? I was six, which would have made you seven. Our rooms were right across from each other, but tiptoeing across the hall would have woken Father, so you climbed outside and came around the house to fetch me. I sat on the sill, my legs hanging out into the air, as you wrapped me in a wool blanket and put boots on my feet. They were your boots, and they were too big on me, but mine had gotten soaked earlier and their lining was still far from dry. I was shivering badly. The night itself was shivering, all its trees astir (astir! My vocabulary becomes so baroque when I look back on our little cabin in the woods). I can feel the wind even now. It put a chill in me that I can never quite seem to shake. But you seemed comfortable enough, and need I remind you we were not blessed with more than one pair of shoes each? I remember looking down at your bare feet (or rather your calves, as there was a goodish bank of snow piled against the house) and experiencing a stab of jealousy that you never got cold like I did. Then you helped me down, your hand around mine . . . your icy, stiff hand . . . and a thought occurred to me that left me all the chillier. It wasn’t that you were never cold, I realized. It was that you were always cold and did not know the difference.

In that moment, for the very first time, I felt frightened of you.

And sad for you, too. Sad most of all.

I threw my arms around you. Even then, you had a foot on me, so my head found your chest. The scared part of me was hiding from you, against you. The other part wanted nothing more than to warm you up. We’re better equipped for sorrow when we’re young. We don’t try to shuck its weight—we grip onto it, and the gripping makes it easier to bear. You squeezed me back, tight, and if Father had observed us then we’d have been sleeping with our windows open for a week. At last you pushed me away and raised your finger to your lips. You were smiling, just a little, and my worries melted away then and there. You were my brother. You were John. And if you didn’t wear shoes in the snow, it was simply because you were an odd duck.

Sidebar (my apologies . . . the hour is late and the Laphroaig runneth deep): ‘odd duck’ was no phrase that would have ever left Arlo Hawthorne’s mouth, and so it was nothing I’d learned at home. I can remember where I picked it up, though. We’d taken a rare visit into town a few months earlier, for the supplies that couldn’t be whittled or otherwise gleaned from the woods. Oil for the truck, nails to shore up the roof, and books from the library . . . if there’s one thing I can thank our father for, it’s that he was as hard on our minds as he was on the rest of us. You had chosen to wait outside, and Father was busy hounding the man at the counter (you should have seen that poor man’s face as our father spoke to him; he looked how ice looks when it’s getting stared at by the sun), which afforded me the chance to peek into a novel I never would have dared crack open otherwise. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis. I flipped and skimmed and snatched up what I could, mouthing the words silently to myself, all the while glancing at the counter to make sure Father’s back stayed turned—fantasy was not on his short list of approved literature. My fingers just about pulled the pages apart, I was clenching onto them so hard. In the story was a little girl who got whisked away to some magic snowy place with a goat thing that could talk. My excitement quickly faded, and I shut the book, disappointed almost to the point of tears. The girl’s sense of wonder made no sense to me. How could she have been excited to leave somewhere warm to go somewhere cold? It was all backwards. The wardrobe should have been waiting for the girl in the woods, and she should have crawled through it into that big, nice house. Not the other way around. I’d wanted a secret to take home me with me, and it was like I’d found home instead. As I set the book back down, turning it over so I didn’t have to look at that stupid, lying lion on the cover, a lady walked by, pushing her son in his stroller. He swiped up a book from the same pile and started chewing on it happily, like nothing had ever tasted better. And his mom let him. She watched him chomp on that book with his nubby-toothed, drooling mouth, and she just patted him on the head and said, “You’re an odd duck, aren’t you?” God, that stunned me. For I don’t know how long after that, I heard her voice wherever I went. In the outhouse, teeth chattering—you’re an odd duck, aren’t you? Skinning what Father brought back from the woods—you’re an odd duck, aren’t you? Lying in bed at night, the dark outside so big I fancied I could hear the roof creaking under its weight—you’re an odd duck, aren’t you? I’d taken a secret home with me from the library, after all. Being an odd duck was my secret, and it wasn’t much, maybe, but I wouldn’t have traded it for a thicker blanket or a softer pillow or an extra slice of deer at dinnertime.

Well, enough of that. I was telling you (assuming you’re reading this to begin with) about the night you came to my window. The night of the wolves.

You led the way along the house, and we crouched down as we passed Father’s room. His shutters were closed, but that man could feel a shadow passing even in his sleep. The moon was a thin white gash overhead—as if the night had been cut open by a paring knife and we were glimpsing its bone. I inched along, fretting over every tiny crunch of the brittle snow beneath my boots. When we were clear of the room and Father’s candle remained unlit, I whispered, “What about our footprints? Won’t he find them?”

You shrugged. “Maybe. But that’s tomorrow. Don’t you want to see?”

I did. I did want to see.

“Race you there,” you said, and I shook my head, but you took off running anyway, knowing I’d do whatever was necessary not to be left alone. My wool blanket flapped about, and I stumbled on every other step. The snow, softer away from the house, powdered up into my face and caught in my eyebrows. The wind chapped my lips and brought a painful, stinging heat to my cheeks. But I kept running, chasing your dark form down the drive and around the bend, until you slowed down and I crashed headlong into your back.

“There,” you said.

A way’s off, etched in pale slivers of moonlight, stood the bulky shadow of Father’s truck. Its bed was cloaked. As we crept toward it, a soft rustling thump reached my ears. Then another, and another. All of the wild’s restless movement was trapped there, inside the back of the truck, and suddenly this did not seem like such a good idea anymore. I tried to tell you to stop, but the meat had been carved from my voice, and what came out of my mouth was less than a croak. You untied the rope holding down the tarp, then lifted the tarp by the corner. The rustle-thumping stopped, and a new silence—a considering silence—fell over the truck.

You waved me closer. I shook my head. But my feet mutinied, bringing me up to that crooked black mouth beneath the tarp. Grates portioned the dark into clean, even blocks. I was looking into a cage.

“Can you see them?” you asked.

No. But I could smell them. Their breaths had ripened the air, warmed it into something raw and alive. Another one of those rustling thumps came from deep inside, making a knot out of every twist and turn in my guts. Then a shape formed. I almost screamed, never mind how badly I wanted to keep quiet. But what stepped forward was so small it could have fit in a stroller (you’re an odd duck, aren’t you?), and my fear shifted into pleasure . . . perhaps even into love. A baby wolf. Just a baby. It whined hopefully, licking your knuckle when you held up your hand.

“You try,” you said.

I slipped a trembling finger through the bars, and my heart was captured the moment that wolf’s hot tongue touched my skin. A delighted laugh escaped my throat—though what you heard probably sounded like a hiccup. The dark shifted inside the cage again. Another wolf, just as tiny, approached us on unsteady paws. Anger flashed inside me. It wasn’t fair, them being locked up like this. It wasn’t natural. I didn’t know the word perversion then, but that’s what this was. They couldn’t even walk right on those grates. I told you earlier that I felt afraid of you for the first time that night, however briefly—and sad for you as well. That night also marked the first time I ever felt real hatred for our father. I looked at those wolves, and I saw us. I saw us in there, too.

“I wish we could let them out,” I said under my breath.

You didn’t hear me—your eyes were on the cage’s deeper shadows. Did you already know what was back there? Did you feel them watching you from the dark? Or did you only suspect?

“He got them from Canada,” you said. “Last week when he took me to town, he made a call from the phone booth. He kept having to put in quarters, he was in there so long. Mostly he talked soft. But I heard a little when he got mad. Something about bringing them down—‘you bring them down or I’ll come up and get them myself and take back what I paid while I’m at it’—and how he didn’t care about the border or if this guy was scared to get caught. Then his voice got low again, and I figure he liked whatever he heard, because when he came out of the booth he drove me to the diner and let me order whatever I wanted.”

You confessed the last bit with a touch of guilt, and I understood why you hadn’t told me earlier about the conversation in the phone booth. Father had never taken me anywhere to eat. My first meal outside our house didn’t come until I was thirteen. But you know that, of course. You were the one who took me.

“What did you get?” I asked, hushed, almost reverential. I’d spent that same day picking the hairs out of raccoon hides.

“French fries.”

“What’re French fries?”

“I don’t know exactly. But there was this blood-looking stuff to dip them in, and they were crispy and salty and good.”

“You should’ve snuck me some.”

“I wanted to. But he watched every bite.” You paused. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I said, but my stomach was rumbling from all this talk of until-then unimagined food. In my distraction, I’d forgotten about the knuckle I was holding in the cage. Small, sharp teeth nipped at my finger, and I yanked it away with a cry. I wasn’t the only hungry one, apparently. You started laughing like a madman, leaning up on the bumper. After a moment I joined in with you. I wanted to be mad at the little fellow for making a snack out of me, but I couldn’t. It was just his nature. We carried on for a stretch, me with my palm over my mouth because I could still imagine Father’s eyes snapping open even though we were some distance from the house. He’d been quiet about what was in his truck, but all day he’d carried a high, crackling energy, a stink of excitement, separate from his normal stink of old sweat and tanning oils. All he’d said was that he had something special out there, and that our woods were going to be a real wilderness soon—a wilderness fit to raise men. If I’d known then what he had planned for us, and for our brothers in the cage, I believe I would have started running and kept running until my body collapsed or he caught me. It is a mercy that we cannot see what waits down the road.

It is a mercy.

“I’ve got an idea,” you said.

I was still coming down from my laughter, and hearing you say those words hurried my fall. “What?” I asked, feeling the wind’s touch again, like teasing knives.

You cupped your hands around your mouth and “awww-ooooed” softly into the cage. The two baby wolves stopped pacing and looked at you. “Awwww-ooooo” you went again, and something awoke in their yellow eyes. I finally caught onto what you were up to, and I grabbed your arm. It was bare, like your feet, and cold. Your muscles were bundled together into tight, eager wires. “Awww-awww-oooooo.”

“Don’t, John. Please don’t. They’ll wake up—”

That’s when the first wolf tipped back its head and howled. It had white fur, with an ashed stripe down its muzzle and a single jet-black ear. I remember its markings well. Years later, I saw those same markings on one of the heads you dumped at Father’s feet. The wolf’s voice cracked around the edges, too thin to hold itself up for long. Then the second wolf picked up where the first left off, and I tell you, John, some unknown part of me lifted when I heard it sing. So what if Father woke up and caught us? So what? This was worth a whipping. This was . . . I could not put the feeling into words. All I knew was I needed this. Like food, like water. I would not have traded this moment for anything—not even for a bowl of French fries.

“Throw it back,” I said, waving at the tarp. “They want to see the moon! They have to see the moon!”

You threw it back. The wolves knew where to look—had known long before they were born, perhaps—and they sang all the fiercer. It wasn’t enough to listen to them anymore. I joined in, and you did too, and we serenaded the moon together on that lonely, snowy road in the frozen nowhere of Vermont. Then, all at once, our howls melted beneath what rose from the covered part of the bed. There was nothing timid or uncertain about these howls. They shook the night to its marrow. They gave voice to the wind. Listening to them was like standing before a black wellspring. All my life’s cold feelings and bad dreams poured over me from the back of the truck. My hairs stood on end. My scalp tightened. What warmth I had remaining was snuffed out violently. I ran, and from the time I turned to the moment I crawled into my bedroom, I looked back only once.

You were still standing there, staring into that caged and howling darkness, and in your profile I saw the man that you would become. You looked so tall, brother. And so grandly, terribly alone.

You don’t have to be, you know.

You are always welcome to tap on my window.

Whatever comes,

Marshall

John folded the letter and tucked it back into the envelope. He did not move again for a long time. The scar on his forearm ached. So did the scars on his back, and those had not troubled him in more years than he could remember. He sat at the desk in his small, stale office, and he thought of Marshall in the Rockies, of Mariah down the hall. It had been so simple, going to her. Now that she was here, he did not know what to do. Waiting was all that was left. For the killing cold to come . . . or, if not the cold, something else.

Something else.

He’d asked Mariah a question, and he’d been unable to explain what he’d meant. He still couldn’t explain. But the question remained, casting a restless shadow over him. What if the sun hadn’t gone out? What if something else was responsible for the night? John ran his tongue along the edge of his teeth. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Without light, one way or another, the world would not survive. Crops would wilt. Animals would starve; people would starve, too, assuming the human race didn’t eat itself alive first. The only commodity that grew in the dark was fear, and fear bred an appetite for self-destruction.

And you, John? Are you afraid?

He pushed slowly out of his chair. For a moment, he felt every bit his age, and then some. He left his brother’s final letter sitting on the desk, too tired to put it back in the drawer, and he turned to leave the office.

A woman’s voice, soft as falling snow, floated through the door.

“I’m all tucked in . . .”

John did not move, did not breathe, until the voice was done speaking. He twisted the knob with a hand that felt detached from his body. Mariah stood over the answering machine. All color was stricken from her face. “I couldn’t sleep, so I came out to look for you, and the little red dot was blinking. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry. But is it true what she said, John? Is she really your daughter?”

“Again,” he said hoarsely. “Play it again.”

Mariah played it again. As they listened, their backs to the living room window, lights began to turn on in the house across the way.

Matthew Krauter, Nicholas’s father, had come home.