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the same. McGill, I want you to be happy.
    His pause stretched into a silence. I let it sit. I didn’t wish to insult McGill’s intelligence.
    She was so lovely, still; it had been less than a decade since he’d first seen her in Grade 10’s History of Europe class. She was a mother now, a wife—but did her skin still not glow with the light of youth? She was a freckle-faced girl then, and those freckles had faded over the years, as they do sometimes. But wasn’t her mouth just as thick with girlish eroticism now, as it was as he watched her laugh by her locker in the G-section downstairs—the locker that McGill made a point of passing by, even when his next class was at the far end of the school. . . .
    “You knew,” he said finally.
    I knew. You wear it on your sleeve, McGill.
    And of course, that was when he gathered the last of his strength. “You can’t tempt me,” he said. “Begone!”
    Oh, McGill. I know I can’t tempt you. That’s why I think I’ll stay here for now. You begone, for a little while. Think about what I said.

    He staggered back, ectoplasm dribbling from his middle finger to make a stain down his pant leg, that had she not been standing there, watching, staring, working it out herself, he would never have been able to explain.
    The baby started to cry. I did nothing to calm it.
    Its mother looked at it in wonder. Did she think she could tell—that her child was returned to her, that the miraculous laying-on-of-hands by McGill had done the trick? Oh, why even ask the question. Of course she did. A mother can tell when her child is wailing, and when something else—some otherworldly thing, perhaps—is manipulating its tiny larynx, making it gargle out blasphemes that only she can hear. . . .
    She scooped the child up in her arms, and held it close. Its tears subsided, and it began to coo. McGill, meanwhile, steadied himself against the doorjamb. He wasn’t in a position to do much else; I’d cast him out, good and proper. A man doesn’t just walk away from something like that.
    She looked at McGill, and he looked back at her. There was something different in her look, and McGill picked up on it. A hint of recognition, perhaps? Gratitude, certainly. Yes, certainly that—McGill could see that it in her eye.
    After all, I had put it there.
    He drew a shaking breath, and nodded, and might have summoned the will to say something. He scarcely had a chance to, though, because as he straightened, her husband was in the doorway with him. He stood staring at her, hands in unconscious fists—a question in his eye too.
    “He’s back,” she said, wonderingly. “Simon’s back, Dave. Whatever he did—worked.”
    Her husband looked at McGill, at that trouser-stain, at McGill’s face, pale and drawn.
    “That so, mister?” he asked.
    McGill had not yet recovered his words. He gulped air and nodded. Her husband clapped him on the shoulder, and strode into the nursery. He leaned over me—over the baby—and reached out with a tentative finger, to touch its chin. She let him take the baby. It clung to him, as I cooed in his ear.
    “It’s . . . too soon,” said McGill finally, and gasped again, “to say . . . for sure.”

    Eventually, even a specimen like McGill gets his wind back.
    When he did, she saw him to the door, while her husband put the baby down. They paused in the kitchen. She put a hand on his arm. This time, McGill didn’t try to worm away. She said something softly to him. A question, yes. Do I know you, from elsewhere? I feel . . . I don’t know, it’s silly.
    That’s the question. I can tell by the way he shuffled, and looked away before looking back.
    She glanced away too—to the nursery, where she saw that her husband was properly distracted. Then she looked back, and leaned closer, and whispered something else.
    McGill nodded, and looked to the nursery himself where he saw the baby, head at its father’s shoulder, looking right back at