“How do you know all this?”

“She talked to me about it,” Lee says. “She’s scared to hurt him. I’ve been in Boston a lot this summer, doing things for the congressman, and she’s there, too, so we get together and talk sometimes. I’ve probably seen her more than Ig has over the last month.”

Terry looks out at the underwater world, sees a reddish haze of light approaching on the right. They’re almost there.

“So why would you want to come by here now?”

“She said she’d call me if she needed a ride home,” Lee says. “And she hasn’t called.”

“So she doesn’t need you, then.”

“But she might not call if she’s upset. I just want to see if Ig’s car is still there or not. Parking’s up front. We don’t even need to pull in.”

Terry doesn’t follow Lee, can’t figure out why he would want to drive by and look for Ig’s car. He also can’t imagine Merrin wanting to be around either of them if things have ended badly.

But Lee is already slowing, turning his head to look past Terry at the parking lot on the right.

“I don’t…” Lee says, talking to himself now. “It’s not…I don’t think she would’ve gone home with him…” Sounding worried, almost.

Terry is the one who sees her, Merrin standing in the rain out by the side of the road, under a walnut with a great spreading crown. “There. Lee, right there.”

She seems to spot them at the same moment and steps out from beneath the tree, one arm raised. With the water coming down the passenger-side window, Terry sees her as through carnival glass, an impressionistic painting of a girl with copper-wire hair, holding aloft what at first seems to be a white votary candle. As they grind to a stop and she moves to the side of the car, Terry sees she is merely holding up a finger to get their attention as she breaks from cover and runs barefoot through the rain, holding her black heels in one hand.

The Caddy is a two-door, and even before Lee tells him to get in back, Terry is unbuckling his belt and turning to loft himself over the front seat. As he is about to pitch into the rear, Lee thuds an elbow into his ass, tipping him off balance, and instead of landing in the seat, Terry dives into the foot well. For God knows what reason, there’s a metal toolbox on the floor, and Terry catches it on the temple, flinches at a sharp stab of pain. He pulls himself up onto the seat and pushes the ball of his hand hard against his banged-up head. It was a mistake to go leaping around, has set off the strongest wave of motion sickness yet, so it feels as if the whole car has been picked up off the ground by a giant who is shaking it slowly, like a cup with dice in it. Terry shuts his eyes, fighting to suppress that sudden nauseating sensation of reckless motion.

By the time things have settled enough for him to risk looking around, Merrin is in the car and Lee Tourneau is turned sideways to face her. Terry looks at his palm and sees a bright drop of blood. He scraped himself good, although that initial sharp pain has already mostly subsided, leaving behind a dull ache. He wipes the blood on his pant leg and looks up.

It is easy to see that Merrin has only just stopped crying. She is pale and shaking, like someone either recovering from or beginning to succumb to illness, and her first attempt at a smile is a miserable thing to look at.

“Thanks for picking me up,” she says. “You just saved my life.”

“Where’s Ig?” Terry asks.

Merrin glances back at him but has trouble making eye contact, and Terry is immediately sorry he asked.

“I d-don’t know. He left.”

Lee says, “You told him?”

Merrin’s chin wrinkles, and she turns to face forward. She looks out the window at The Pit and doesn’t reply.

“How’d he take it?” Lee asks.

Terry can see her face reflected in the glass, can see her biting her lips and struggling not to cry. Her answer is “Can we just go?”

Lee nods and puts on his blinker, then pulls a U-ie in the rain.

Terry wants to touch her shoulder, wants to reassure her in some way, let her know that whatever happened in The Pit, he doesn’t hate her or hold it against her. But Terry doesn’t touch her, won’t touch her, never touches her. In a decade of knowing her, he has kept her at a friendly distance, even in his imagination, has never once considered allowing her into his sexual fantasies. There would be no harm in such a thing, yet he senses he would be placing something at risk all the same. What he would be placing at risk, he cannot say. To Terry the word “soul” first refers to a kind of music.

Instead he says, “Hey, girl, you want my jacket?” Because she is shivering helplessly and steadily in her wet clothes.

For the first time, Lee seems to notice the way she’s trembling as well-which is funny, since he keeps shooting her glances, looking at her as much as he’s looking at the road-and turns down the air conditioner.

“’S all right,” she says, but Terry already has his coat off and is handing it forward. She spreads it across her legs. “Thank you, Terry,” she says in a small voice, and then, “You m-must think-”

“I don’t think anything,” Terry says. “So relax.”

“Ig-”

“I’m sure Ig is fine. Don’t you worry yourself.”

She gives him a pained, grateful smile and then leans back toward him and says, “Are you all right?” She reaches out to lightly touch his brow, where he went face-first into Lee’s toolbox. He flinches almost instinctively from her touch. She draws her fingers back, blood on the tips of them, looks at her hand, then back at him. “You ought to have some g-gauze for that.”

“It’s fine. No worries,” Terry says.

She nods and turns away, and immediately the smile is gone and her eyes come unfocused, staring at nothing anyone else can see. She is folding something in her hands, over and over, and unfolding it, and then starting up again. A tie, Ig’s tie. This is somehow worse than seeing her in tears, and Terry has to look away. Being stoned no longer feels good in the slightest. He would like to lie motionless somewhere and close his eyes for a few minutes. Nap some and wake up fresh and himself again. The night has turned rancid on him, very quickly, and he wants someone to blame, someone to be irritated with. He settles on Ig.

It irritates him that Ig would peel off, leave her standing in the rain, an act so immature it’s laughable. Laughable but not surprising. Merrin has been a lover, a comfort blanket, a guidance counselor, a defensive barrier against the world, and a best friend to Ig. Sometimes it seems they have been married since Ig was fifteen. But for all that, it began as and always was a high-school relationship. Terry is sure Ig has never even kissed another girl, let alone fucked one, and he has wished for a while now that his brother had more experience. Not because Terry doesn’t want him to be with Merrin but because…well, because. Because love requires context. Because first relationships are by their very nature immature. So Merrin wanted them both to have a chance to grow up. So what?

Tomorrow morning, on the drive to Logan Airport, Terry will have Ig alone and a chance to set him straight about a couple of things. He will tell Ig that his ideas about Merrin, about their relationship-that it was meant to be, that she was more perfect than other girls, that their love was more perfect than other loves, that together they dealt in small miracles-was a suffocating trap. If Ig hated Merrin now, it was only because he had discovered she was a real person, with failings and needs and a desire to live in the world, not in Ig’s daydreams. That she loved him enough to let him go, and he had to be willing to do the same, that if you loved someone, you could set them free, and-fuck, that was a Sting song.

“Merrin, are you all right?” Lee asks. She is still shivering almost convulsively.

“No. Y-yes. I-Lee, please pull over. Pull over here.” These last three words said with an urgent clarity.