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justice falls."
     
She'd puzzled over this, her father's inversion of heaven and justice, of love and retribution, of forgiveness and reprisal. Was he just playing with words? He never played with words. Let Heaven be done, though justice falls. It was one of the few moments she remembered her dad ever being philosophical—if that's what that was—and it had stayed with her all these years precisely because it was so unusual. It seemed to offer a glimpse of something that lay below what she called his "dad demeanour."
     
Laura never did finish that essay; she was marked "incomplete," a verdict harsher than failure, in her mind. Even now, she carried the memory of that grade like a burden. Incomplete.
     
Laura had called home from the dorm every Sunday, sometimes with a forced joviality in her voice, other times sniffling with sadness. She spoke to her mom at great length about the minutiae of university life, the profs she disliked and those she could stand, the workload, the daily defeats, the small victories. With her father, though, it was mainly mundane: pleasantries accompanied by assurances from Laura that she was doing well, was knuckling down, studying hard. But if Laura's mother got to hear the detailed ins and outs of Laura's life, it was always her dad who got to say goodbye.
     
"Here's your father."
     
He would end the calls with "I love you." That way, he explained, "The last thing you hear before you go to sleep will be
     
love." She'd teased him about this. "Not love. You," she said.
     
"Me?"
     
"You. The last thing I hear is you. If you wanted to end it on love, you'd have to reword it."
     
And so it became a running joke between them. Whenever she phoned, the call would end with her father telling her: "You, I love."It was something they shared throughout her Away Years, something she hadn't heard for a long, long while. Somewhere along the way, it had been forgotten. But when they'd said goodbye that day in the food court, he'd called back to her as she was leaving.
     
"Laura?"
     
"Yes, Dad?"
     
"You, I love."
     
Why would he have done that?
     
     

CHAPTER 15
     
     
There had been a boy at university. Not a boy. A grad student who taught one of her introductory English courses. There had been a baby as well. No. Not a baby. A shadow, a smudge on an ultrasound followed by protestations. "I can't be somebody's father. I can't. I'm not ready. I'll never be ready." Not that it mattered; Laura wasn't able to carry the child, and the entire incident had long been pushed down into the footnotes of her life. She hadn't told anyone about it. Not even her dad.
     
After university she'd been hired by Harlequin, proofreading romances. She'd later moved on to pocketbook police procedurals and then into the lucrative world of freelance copy editing. Memoirs, biographies, manuals. It was her job to impose a consistency of grammar, spelling, punctuation, to compile a style sheet of preferred spellings and usages for each particular project. It was decidedly unsexy, but it paid the rent (barely), even if it did come with certain challenges, mainly in the form of intransigent authors.
     
One particularly troublesome author had insisted on ending many of his sentences with... nothing. No period, no question mark, no exclamation, not even an ellipsis. Laura had dutifully gone through and fixed these, adding a semicolon here, a period there, only to receive a barrage of incensed emails after the author had reviewed the pages. "How dare you!" the emails typically began.
     
Laura had tried to explain to him that every seritence needed an ending, but the author had refused to accept this and had fought back with a passion worthy of a better cause. "Not everything has an ending! Open your eyes!" he wrote—using exclamation marks, ironically enough. After several testy back-and-forths, it became clear that it would be easier for the publisher to simply acquiesce. The reviewers then complained (inevitably) about