There was a knock at the door, and that connection between them-evanescent as a butterfly that lands on your hand-broke. “Are you expecting someone?” Josie’s mother asked.

She wasn’t, but she went to answer it anyway. When Josie opened the door, she found the detective who’d interviewed her standing there.

Didn’t detectives show up at your door only when you were in serious trouble?

Breathe, Josie, she told herself, and she noticed he was holding a bottle of wine just as her mother came out to see what was going on.

“Oh,” her mother said. “Patrick.”

Patrick?

Josie turned and realized her mother was blushing.

He held out the bottle of wine. “Since this seems to be a bone of contention between us…”

“You know what?” Josie said, uncomfortable. “I’m just, um, going to go study.” She’d leave it to her mother to figure out how she was going to do that, since she’d finished her homework before dinner.

She flew up the stairs, pounding extra hard with her feet so that she wouldn’t hear what her mother was saying. In her room, she turned the music on her CD player up to its loudest level, threw herself onto her bed, and stared up at the ceiling.

Josie had a midnight curfew, not that she was using it at all now. But before, the bargain went like this: Matt would get Josie home by midnight; in return, Josie’s mother would disappear like smoke the moment they entered the house, retreating upstairs so that she and Matt could fool around in the living room. She had no idea what her mother’s rationale for this was-unless it was that it was safer for Josie to be doing this in her own living room than in a car or under the bleachers. She could remember how they’d come together in the dark, their bodies fusing and their silence measured. Realizing that at any moment her mom might come down for a drink of water or an aspirin only made it that much more exciting.

At three or four in the morning, when her eyes were blurry and her chin rubbed raw by beard stubble, Josie would kiss Matt good night at the front door. She’d watch his taillights disappear like the glow of a dying cigarette. She’d tiptoe upstairs, past her mother’s bedroom, thinking: You don’t know me at all.

“If I won’t let you buy me a drink,” Alex said, “then what makes you think I’d take a bottle of wine from you?”

Patrick grinned. “I’m not giving it to you. I’m going to open it, and you might just choose to borrow some.”

As he said this, he was walking into the house, as if he already knew the way. He stepped into the kitchen, sniffed twice-it still smelled of the ashes of pizza crust and incinerated milk-and began to randomly open and close drawers until he found a corkscrew.

Alex folded her arms, not because she was cold, but because she could not remember feeling this light inside, as if her body housed a second solar system. She watched Patrick remove two wineglasses from a cabinet and pour.

“To being a civilian,” he said, toasting.

The wine was rich and full; like velvet; like autumn. Alex closed her eyes. She would have liked to hold on to this moment, drag it wider and fuller, until it covered up so many others that had come before.

“So, how is it?” Patrick asked. “Being unemployed?”

She thought for a moment. “I made a grilled cheese sandwich today without burning the pan.”

“I hope you framed it.”

“Nah, I left that to the prosecution.” She smiled at her own little inside joke, and then felt it dissolve on the tails of her thoughts as she imagined Diana Leven’s face. “Do you ever feel guilty?” Alex asked.

“Why?”

“Because for a half a second, you’ve almost forgotten everything that happened.”

Patrick put down his wineglass. “Sometimes, when I’m going through the evidence and I see a fingerprint or a photo or a shoe that belonged to one of the kids who died, I take a little more time to look at it. It’s crazy, but it seems like someone ought to, so that they’re remembered an extra minute or two.” He looked up at her. “When someone dies, their lives aren’t the ones that stop at that moment, you know?”

Alex lifted her glass of wine and drained it. “Tell me how you found her.”

“Who?”

“Josie. That day.”

Patrick met her gaze, and Alex knew he was weighing her right to know what her daughter had experienced against his wish to save her from a truth that would cut her to the quick. “She was in the locker room,” he began quietly. “And I thought…I thought she was dead, too, because she was covered in blood, facedown next to Matt Royston. But then she moved and-” His voice broke. “It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.”

“You know you’re a hero, don’t you?”

Patrick shook his head. “I’m a coward. The only reason I ran into that building was because if I didn’t, I’d have nightmares for the rest of my life.”

Alex shivered. “I have nightmares, and I wasn’t even there.”

He took away her wineglass and studied her palm, as if he were going to read her the line of her life. “Maybe you should try not sleeping,” Patrick said.

His skin smelled of evergreen and spearmint, this close. Alex could feel her heart pounding through the tips of her fingers. She imagined he could feel it, too.

She didn’t know what was going to happen next-what was supposed to happen next-but it would be random, unpredictable, uncomfortable. She was getting ready to push away from him when Patrick’s hands anchored her in place. “Stop being such a judge, Alex,” he whispered, and he kissed her.

When feeling came back, in a storm of color and force and sensation, the most you could do was hold on to the person beside you and hope you could weather it. Alex closed her eyes and expected the worst-but it wasn’t a bad thing; it was just a different thing. A messier one, a more complicated one. She hesitated, and then she kissed Patrick back, willing to concede that you might have to lose control before you could find what you’d been missing.

The Month Before

When you love someone, there’s a pattern to the way you come together. You might not even realize it, but your bodies are choreographed: a touch on the hip, a stroke of the hair. A staccato kiss, break away, a longer one, his hand slipping under your shirt. It’s a routine, but not in the boring sense of the word. It’s just the way you’ve learned to fit, and it’s why, when you’ve been with one guy for a long time, your teeth do not scrape together when you kiss; you do not bump noses or elbows.

Matt and Josie had a pattern. When they started making out, he’d lean in and look at her as if he couldn’t possibly see any other part of the world. It was hypnotism, she realized, because after a while she sort of felt that way, too. Then he’d kiss her, so slowly that there was hardly pressure on her mouth, until she was the one pushing against him for more. He worked his way down her body, from mouth to neck, from neck to breasts, and then his fingers would do a search-and-rescue mission below the waistband of her jeans. The whole thing lasted about ten minutes, and then Matt would roll off her and take the condom out of his wallet so they could have sex.

Not that Josie minded any of it. If she was going to be honest, she liked the pattern. It felt like a roller coaster-going up that hill, knowing what was coming next on track and knowing, too, that she couldn’t do anything to stop it.

They were in her living room, in the dark, with the television on for background noise. Matt had already peeled off her clothes, and now he was leaning over her like a tidal wave, pulling down his boxers. He sprang free and settled between Josie’s legs.

“Hey,” she said, as he tried to push into her. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

“Aw, Jo. Just once, I don’t want there to be anything between us.”