"I have to," Eric said, and did not know how to finish. "I need to go outside for a minute."
"Eric, please, let me…"
"I need to go outside," he said again, and he went.
* * *
The yard looked exactly the same, which seemed impossible. The sun had dropped behind the neighbor's palm trees, and someone, probably Dana, had plugged in the string lights, so now they glowed in their long zigzags over the pool, soft yellow bulbs against a sky going purple and peach. The children were still in the water. Mark was at the grill, moving burgers onto a platter with the concentration of a man defusing a bomb. Conversations had resumed, but at a lower volume, and they paused as Eric came out the door and then started up again too brightly.
He stood on the patio. He did not know where to go. His body wanted to walk somewhere, anywhere, out the side gate and down the street and keep walking until the desert, but there were thirty people in his yard and his daughter was in the pool and his mother was watching him from her cushioned chair with her shrewd old eyes.
Then he saw Jenna.
She was standing by the dessert table where Melissa had left her. Jenna was two years older than her sister, shorter, with her hair cut in a practical bob and reading glasses pushed up on her head. She had been his ally for nineteen years. She had stood up at their wedding. She was Lily's godmother. She was looking at him now with an expression of such naked sorrow and guilt that he understood everything in a single instant, the way you understand a word in a foreign language you did not know you spoke.