year from now, back in her cabin, driving to work, writing evaluations. Bruce, she supposed, would be writing out instructions for the nanny before he left for work. She could only glimpse this if she concentrated very hard: there he was gnawing on a piece of dry toast as he chased two squealing toddlers down a hallway, his tie looped around his neck. It seemed more like an image from a movie, or an advertisement for deodorant, than something real and foregone.
Bruce sat up, rubbed his face all over with one hand. He shook his head, like he was trying to dislodge something inside of it, then picked Ben up and held him to his chest, kneaded his diaper briefly to check for heaviness, see if he needed to be changed.
“Do you want me to make the list for you? Not that I could promise you it would be totally thorough. Mom’s probably already got three of everything anyway.”
Bruce smiled sadly at her. Knox suddenly wanted to brush at the hollows under his eyes with her fingertips and erase them. He looked awful, really.
“You’ve been great,” he said, his voice quiet. “Thank you.”
Her mother had called her wonderful, and now this.
“I’m not great,” Knox said. “I’m here for the wrong reasons.”
Bruce settled Ben on his lap so that he faced forward. He looked improbably alert, as if waiting for the proper moment to contribute to the general conversation.
“Well, whatever you’re here for, I’m grateful,” Bruce said. He rubbed at Ben’s soft scalp. “I wasn’t sure I would be, to be honest. I didn’t want anybody around. This is going to sound strange, but I didn’t want to leave the hospital.”
“I don’t think it’s strange.”
“In school, I had a friend whose mother went missing. I remember hearing later that he hadn’t wanted to move out of the apartment where she’d lived with them, in case she came back. It’s something like that, I think.”
“What happened?”
“She died.”
They watched each other. Knox was conscious of the possibility that her face might be blotchy from before, from crying. She was holding her breath.
“You didn’t give me much choice, when you told me you were coming,” Bruce said. “But you’re good with the boys. I can see that you love them.”
“I’m not a baby person,” Knox said.
“Well, you’re good at pretending, then.”
“Actually, I lack imagination.”
“Okay,” Bruce said. He cocked his head. “Clearly you refuse to take a compliment.”
“I don’t know what Charlotte ever said to you. But I shut her out. I was not a good sister to her for a long time.”
Bruce closed his eyes. Something about the oddly intimate sight of him this way provided Knox with a brief moment of comfort, even though this was only a facsimile of him in sleep. She’d been worried about him; she felt the full weight of this now.
“What’s a good sister? Is there a definition in the dictionary for that?”
“A friend. I was angry with her all the time.”
“Well, she wasn’t easy.”
“No.”
She wanted to ask: Not easy how, from your perspective? But she was aware that she was talking to Bruce about his wife and needed to quell the bounce of excitement in her chest at the unexpected possibility—the most far-fetched possibility on earth, it had seemed—that Bruce understood her.
“I think she just wanted to know you were on her side,” Bruce continued, and Knox’s small hope turned despairing in an instant: here was confirmation of complaint, of bad opinion pooled between husband and wife that she would never be fully privy to.
“I know.” She pressed against her eyes with the palms of her hands. Peekaboo. I see you. “And I wasn’t. I should have been, but I wasn’t after a certain point. Honestly, it was easier once she’d left. She made our mom cry.”
“Well, that was a long time ago. She was a teenager.”
“She made my father feel bad. She forgot about me when she went away. She never even really knew Ned.” She took up all the oxygen, Knox thought, she left no room for anybody else’s problems, she was always the beautiful one—What was she doing? She sounded pathetic.
“I love your family, Knox. I’m not going to act like I understand everything about it. It’s yours. But I don’t want you speaking like this in front of Ben, okay?”
Bruce broke off. At the same moment, Ethan began to cry softly, without having fully committed himself, in the next room. He was waking up.
“I’ve been careful not to let them see me breaking