He looked up at the bed. Delia had turned on her side toward the wall. Her hair spilled across the pillow, pale in the blue light. She did not move.
"Delia?" he whispered.
Nothing. Her breathing was slow and even.
He sat there for a while longer with the Silvertone across his knees, and then he put it back in its case, very quietly, and lay down on the sleeping bag, and was almost asleep when he heard her voice, so low it was barely there, speaking into the wall.
"*Tu me dois toujours un franc,*" she said.
He did not speak French. He fell asleep trying to hold onto the sound of it, and lost it, the way you lose a dream.
---
He woke to the smell of bacon and the sound of a shovel scraping concrete somewhere down the block, and the bed above him was empty and neatly made, the plaid spread pulled tight, the rosebud nightgown folded on the pillow.
The world outside the window was blinding. The snow had stopped sometime before dawn, and the sky had scoured itself a hard, brilliant blue, and every surface on Juniper Lane was heaped and sculpted and glittering. The Valiant had vanished altogether under a drift that came up past its door handles. Two houses down, a boy in a red snowsuit was tunneling into a snowbank under the supervision of a beagle.