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important thing Lily would wind up needing to know would be, essentially, a cliché, a little beat of verisimilitude in the preordained rhythm of a crime drama. How darkly hilarious, that this would turn out to be what they’d most needed to teach her. But instead they had raised an unworldly daughter; a child so confident in her language skills (a 5 on the AP exam, after all!), and so proud of the sophistication of her reasoning abilities (those papers on Quine!), and so assured of the infallibility of her innocence (!) that she assumed, wrongly and bravely, that her rational goodness could prevent disaster—even though the thesis of all of their lives had been that this was not so. How strangely funny that was. Andrew was going to laugh about that. Andrew was going to laugh about all of it, just as soon as he got out of this jail.
    “Okay,” said the man in the box. “You can come in now.”
    Andrew squeezed Anna’s shoulder, and they walked through another set of metal detectors and down a long hall of blue doors. The light was dimmer here, and Andrew had trouble telling if the clots of darkness in the corners were dirt or only shadows. The blue doors ended and a glass-walled room began and there, sitting at a table, fingers spread out before her with an odd, unsettling sort of precision, was Lily.
    Her head was bent forward. Her hair, Andrew could see, was verydirty. He couldn’t remember the last time Lily’s hair had been really dirty—maybe that time she’d had pneumonia for ten days when she was seven. She looked sallow, bony—a little Third World, Andrew couldn’t help thinking, though this was no longer a relevant term, post–Cold War. He could feel Anna startle against him, and he pressed his hand to her wrist. It was very important that neither of them seem startled.
    The guard fumbled with his keys, rattling them. Lily still did not look up, and Andrew realized she couldn’t hear them. But she knew they were coming; shouldn’t she have been waiting, head raised, face expectant? The fact that she wasn’t seemed another bad sign, alongside the hair and that awful thing she was doing with her fingers.
    The guard opened the door, and Lily finally looked up. The skin underneath her eyes was dark and dingy; her lips were very dry. Andrew flashed to an image of Janie—unconscious, intubated, her little macerated mouth a gaudy red, too gaudy for a two-year-old. The paleness of Lily’s skin now reminded him of the paleness of Janie’s skin then: It was the color of absence or impending departure. Andrew had expected Lily to stand, maybe even jump up, but she didn’t—she just smiled a sickly smile and waited for them to come to her.
    “Dad,” she said. Andrew went to her and hugged her, taking some basic inventory as he did so. Up close she seemed about the right size, he supposed, like the same essentially sturdy child she’d always been (he remembered a picture of her on her fifth birthday, wearing some goofy little red jumper that Maureen had bought and that Anna wore later, her calf muscles straining as she stood on tiptoe to give a kiss to a man in an enormous Winnie-the-Pooh suit whom Maureen had hired for the occasion). Andrew grazed his hand along Lily’s forehead—her temperature seemed normal—and he squeezed her fingertips—like her mother, her circulation sucked, and her extremities were always getting too cold—but they seemed okay, just chilly, not frozen. He cupped the back of her head with his hand, a gesture that he knew was self-consciously maternal, that he knew he was copying from Maureen. It occurred to him briefly that it had been years since Lilywould have allowed him such familiarities; since college began she’d become physically curt, a giver of hugs that seemed to communicate her general displeasure with the overall project of hugging. Andrew lingered for a moment with his hand on Lily’s head, just because he could. Then he stepped away so Anna could hug