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twenty-dollar bill and awkwardly handed it to Lucia along with the paper.
    â€œNo, no,” Lucia told her, returning the bill. She gestured to the cross around Sophie’s neck, almost touching it. “God’s blessing to you, Sophie Crane. I’ll look in on your father.”
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    As Sophie entered her apartment she heard the phone ringing, and she had the unsettling feeling that it was morning again. She was coming back from mass, and she would have to live the entire exhausting day over again. This time she didn’t wait to pick up. She wanted to get it all over with.
    â€œHello?”
    â€œYou answered.”
    How happy she was to hear her husband’s voice, to find it unchanged by what she’d done.
    â€œAre you coming home soon?”
    â€œI wish you would have picked up earlier. I’ve been calling for hours.”
    â€œI’m sorry,” she said. “I was out. You should have called my cell.”
    â€œIt’s been turned off all day.”
    â€œI’m sorry,” she said again.
    â€œWhat have you been up to?” She sensed him trying to calm himself, waiting for her to confirm his fears.
    â€œI went to get your father from the hospital.”
    As she said this, it might have been just another chore that they’d both known she had to fulfill, as it would in another family.
    â€œSoph.”
    â€œI had no choice, Tom. The man is old and very sick and alone.”

    â€œIt’s his own fault he’s alone.”
    She wanted to tell him how it felt in Crane’s apartment, wanted to say that she saw there all the things that he had saved her from. More than that, she wanted him to want to hear about his father.
    â€œMaybe so,” she finally said.
    â€œAnd if he didn’t need something from us, he never would have called.”
    â€œThat’s probably true.”
    In the quiet that followed, certain ideas burst forth that she guarded carefully. He had a parent, as she did not, and it was inhuman of him to forsake this legacy, no matter what the man had done.
    â€œLet’s not do this now,” she said. “We can talk when you get home.”
    â€œI’m going to be held up here for a while.”
    â€œOkay. I’ll try to wait up. If I can’t, I’ll make us a big breakfast and we’ll talk in the morning.”
    â€œAll right.”
    â€œDon’t be mad.”
    â€œI’ll get over it,” he said.
    â€œI love you,” she told him.
    â€œYou too, kid.”
    A moment before she would have liked to talk with him forever. Now she hung up the phone in relief.

3
    LONG AFTER WANDERING upstairs that night, I heard the laughter and talk on the floor below. We’d always let those parties run their natural course, and I had learned to sleep amid that murmur, like one who lives near the sea. But on that night I stayed up, listening to the noise downstairs, trying to make out Sophie’s voice. I had waited about an hour downstairs before giving up on her return, and I still couldn’t sleep without knowing if she’d come back. By my best estimate, it had been a year since I’d seen Sophie, at the wedding of a New Hampton friend. Now that we had been returned to each other, I didn’t want her to disappear again. She came in finally to say good night, stepping through a sheet of dusty light in the doorway, as though she knew I’d been waiting for her.
    â€œSleep,” she said, when I sat up to reach for her. “In the morning, we can talk.”
    But the uneasiness didn’t pass once she was gone. I realized that I had known all along that she would find a couch or one of the spare beds when the party wound down, that
I would see her in the morning. I had been listening for her not because I doubted her return, but because I wanted to know she wasn’t with Max.
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    Max was a sophomore at Yale the year Sophie and I started college. Early in December, he took