He nodded. Then he stood there quietly while I worked, the way good neighbors sometimes do, present without requiring anything, which after eight months of elaborate lies being constructed around me was one of the finest things anyone had ever offered.
Three years later, Ellery asked me once whether I was ever scared that night.
We were driving to her soccer game. October light, same as always. Mountains visible behind the highway.
“Yes,” I said.
“Of what?”
“Of not getting back to you fast enough.”
She thought about this.
“But you did,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “I did.”
She seemed satisfied with that. She looked back out the window at the mountains.
I drove toward the game through the ordinary morning of an ordinary fall, and the road was familiar, and the sky was clear, and Ellery was in the seat beside me, and that was enough.
