Outside, a car passed on Laurel Court, its headlights sweeping briefly across the Ellison front windows and then gone. The house settled into its evening noises — the refrigerator's low hum, the tick of the cooling vents, the distant bark of the Hendersons' dog two doors down. Monique's fingers were cold on Thomas's wrist. He could feel her pulse, or his own; he could not tell which.
Ava looked from her mother to him and back again.
"Are you mad at me?" she whispered.
Monique's face crumpled. She released Thomas's arm and sank back onto the sofa, gathering her daughter against her side with a ferocity that was half embrace and half shelter. "No, baby. No. I'm not mad at you." Her voice broke on the last word. "I'm just — I'm tired. And that letter was your daddy's to keep. Not ours to open. Not yet. Maybe not ever."
Thomas still held the envelope. He did not open it. He turned it once more in his hands, feeling the slight give of paper that had waited too long. The handwriting on the front was unmistakable. He had seen it on birthday cards and borrowed textbooks and, once, on a note left under a windshield wiper in a college parking lot: Gone home. Don't wait up. —A.
Andrew.
His brother.
Andrew Grant, who had been twenty-two years old in the summer of 2001, who had taken their father's old Boston Whaler out onto the Chesapeake on a clear August morning and never come back. Whose empty boat had been found drifting near the mouth of the Rappahannock three days later. Whose body had never been recovered. Whose memorial service had been held in a church in Richmond with a photograph on an easel because there was nothing else to bury.