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going, trying to unravel my dead husband’s last hours.
    He decided to use the medicine to knock me out. Maybe he wasn’t even sure it would do the trick, but once it did, as soon as I slipped into a weirdly solid sleep, there was nothing to keep Brendan from that hideous hank of rope and the light fixture on our back stairs.
    What kind of medication was it? Why had the doctor prescribed it?
    Shivering, I stepped beneath the blast of water, taking only a second or two under the stream before fumbling for a towel. Then I padded down the icy floorboards toward Brendan’s study, taking care not to wake my sister.
    I didn’t bother sitting down. The chair in here was Brendan’s, and I couldn’t stand to be in that right now. In fact, almost everything here belonged to Brendan. Until recently, when I’d created a few files, I’d seldom had any need for a computer. And I wasn’t one for lounging about reading, preferring instead to be out working with my hands.
    I stared at the laptop on the desk, then identified a button that seemed to take a great deal of effort to depress. The machine came sluggishly to life, a series of bleeps and grindings that sounded very loud in the still morning. I glanced around, but my sister slept on securely, two rooms away.
    Sonodrine
, it said on the bottle she had found.
    My right hand shook as I typed the word. I clutched at the towel with my left, clenched into a quaking fist. My shoulders were pebbly with gooseflesh and if I didn’t get into some clothes quickly, I was going to start to cry with sheer discomfort and cold. I clicked on the first page that came up, then the next, and another, going back to read them all in quick succession, as fast as I could mouse between tabs. My gaze flicked left to right, but I took in hardly any words.
    It didn’t matter what the Internet came up with. The vast, infinitely tangled Web didn’t know Brendan, and it certainly didn’t know me. I hated technology, so cold and heartless compared to the warm, beating pulse I felt when I laid my hands upon plaster or wood. I needed a real, breathing human being who wouldn’t offer me manufacturer warnings, chemical composites, or frequencies of use, but would instead tell me why Brendan might’ve taken this particular drug on that fateful night.
    â€œNora?”
    Teggie, huddled in a robe, was standing in the doorway, blinking, her curls stuck up at odd angles.
    â€œIt’s early, go back to sleep,” I said, pushing past her to my room.
    Teggie followed, yawning.
    I yanked out clothes from a drawer, then dressed, leaving my top buttons undone. It was an insane way to dress in Wedeskyull in winter. From the time I’d arrived in this new, strange climate, a compressed fall succumbing to six or seven months of winter’s biting cold, I had adapted to extra layers and multiple kinds of outerwear. But I could no longer bear the feeling of being bundled up to my neck.
    My sister trailed me into the hall.
    â€œWhere are we going?” She sounded awake.
    I hesitated. “I think I have to do this myself, Teg.”
    She eyed me, a look of understanding passing over her face.
    I used to disbelieve the way people got used to devastating events. Circumstances they once thought they could never bear: a terminal diagnosis, or losses so grievous that just the mention of them before they occurred required tapping on wood and begging God to forbid.
    Now I knew how they did it.
    Your definition of what was bad changed. The unthinkable turned into the familiar, and other, more dire things became what you needed at all costs to prevent.
    Brendan had hung himself from the top of the odd, crooked back staircase I had been laboring to restore. He did it after making sure I would sleep through his monstrous machinations, after muffling my ears and brain against the dry, reedy jolt of rope giving up its final slack.
    Nothing could change that. The worst had