On the drive back she said, "Marcus would have wanted to be here."
"He was here," Thomas said. "Every mile of it. He got Andrew as far as the closet shelf. We finished the route."
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In February, Thomas drove to Gloucester.
He did not know what he intended. He parked across from a hardware store with a green awning and watched through the windshield as a man in his late forties — solid, graying at the temples, laughing at something a customer said — moved through the aisles with the easy ownership of a life that had continued. This was the parking-lot man. The concussion. The pivot on which Andrew's entire vanished life had turned.
Thomas did not go inside.
He sat for twenty minutes. He watched the man help an elderly woman load bags of mulch into her trunk. He watched a school bus pass. He watched ordinary mercies accumulate like snow. Then he started the car and drove home through the winter afternoon, and by the time he reached Laurel Court he understood that some doors are better left as doors — acknowledged, respected, not opened. The man in Gloucester had healed in six weeks. Andrew had not healed in twenty-five years. That asymmetry was not the man's to answer for, and Thomas would not make him answer for it.
When he told Monique about the trip, she listened without judgment. They were on her back steps. Ava was inside watching cartoons with the volume too loud. The winter sky was the color of tin.