Daniel raised his bottle an inch. "For the record, I still sometimes want to throw that guy into this lake. I don't know his swimming ability. I'm at peace with the mystery."
Jason snorted, surprised by his own laugh. The sound loosened something in the trees. "Get in line," he said. Then, quieter: "He sent me a letter in March. Paper. No return drama. He said he would not contact either of us, that he had taken a contract in Minneapolis through the fall, and that what he owed me was absence. I didn't answer. I didn't throw it away either. It's in the folder with Rachel's pages. I don't know what kind of man that makes me."
"A record-keeper," Daniel said. "We've always been that. Dad's toolbox had labels. You think you invented documentation?"
They sat with the loon and the mosquitoes and the knowledge that Andre Ellis was in another city, living a life that did not include their doorway. Rachel felt the information move through her: relief, a sting of grief, the strange dignity of a man who had made himself scarce. She did not ask to read the letter. Wanting its sentences would have been another back row. Jason, watching her not ask, seemed to count the not-asking as a kind of faithfulness, small and real, worth more than a speech.
The following October, the anniversary returned like a debt. Eleven had become twelve. No one suggested a surprise. The suggestion would have been a cruelty dressed as a joke, and they were past that particular costume. What they did instead was almost plain. Megan took Sophie overnight to see a movie and eat pancakes that were, Sophie reported later, inferior to Jason's but superior in whipped cream. Carol sent a card that said only Twelve years. Still here. Love, Mom and Dad. Daniel sent nothing, which was correct, and texted Jason a picture of a cake in a grocery store with the caption do not.
Rachel and Jason stayed home. She cooked, badly, a chicken that forgave her. He opened a bottle of wine they did not finish. The marble island held two plates and not a crowd. After dinner he brought out the silver frame, which had lived in a drawer since the night it fell. The glass had been replaced. A faint warp in the metal remained, a scar you could feel with a thumb. In the photograph they were still twenty-four and twenty-seven, still trusting October.