Andrew.
Alive until last April.
Dead again, for keeps, while Thomas mowed his lawn and paid his taxes and nodded to Monique across the driveway, never knowing that her husband had been carrying his brother's last words in a bottom drawer like a live coal.
He remembered, suddenly and with a force that made his throat close, the last ordinary morning he had spent with Andrew. It had been a Tuesday in late July of 2001. They had stood in their mother's kitchen in Richmond arguing about nothing — about whose turn it was to mow, about whether the Whaler needed a new spark plug, about a girl Andrew was seeing whose name Thomas could no longer recall. Andrew had stolen the last of the coffee and grinned that grin that always meant he knew he was being forgiven in advance. Thomas had called him an idiot and shoved his shoulder and gone to work. Three weeks later the Coast Guard was searching the bay, and Thomas was standing in a church vestibule holding a photograph of that grin in a cheap black frame.
He had spent twenty-five years replaying that kitchen argument, wishing he had said something larger, something that might have anchored Andrew to the world. He had never imagined that the problem was not absence of love but surplus of shame.
"I should go," Thomas said, but he did not move.
"Stay," Monique said. "Please. Just for a while. I don't want to sit with this alone, and I can't wake her yet." She glanced at Ava. "She thinks she did something terrible tonight. Finding it. Bringing you. I need her to wake up and see that the world didn't end."
So he stayed.