If he’s around. The other thing he’s thought about, stuck in his house watching the silhouettes of mountains that hold a dead boy folded away somewhere among their dreamy curves, is putting his place on the market and getting on a plane back to Chicago, or Seattle maybe. In a few more days he’ll have done what Trey needs from him; there’ll be no responsibilities left to hold him here. He could be packed and gone in less than an hour.

He pays for his groceries, and Noreen talks him out the door, promising to send Lena up to him with cabbage poultices and the number of a good roofer. Cal has no way of knowing whether she believes a word he said, but he understands that, as far as she’s concerned, that’s beside the point.

Finally the rain clears. Cal, who the day before would have sworn he was going to start chewing the woodwork if he couldn’t get out and get this job done, decides it would be only sensible to let some of the rainwater drain out of the mountainside before he goes digging around in it. He stays home that day, and then the next, to be on the safe side.

He’s not shying from Brendan. He doesn’t welcome the prospect, but whatever condition the body is in, he’s seen worse. He knows what he needs to do there, and he’s ready to do it. The part that offers him no such clarity is the part after that.

Any minute now, though, Trey is going to come looking for her proof. Cal has seen nothing of her since Lena took her home. He doesn’t like the thought of her up there on the mountainside with no one but Sheila to keep an eye on how she’s doing, but he did tell her to give him two weeks, and he figures it’s probably a good thing that she’s doing it: she needs this time to take in all that’s happened, and to ready herself for what comes next. But he also figures that around about now, with the two weeks ticking away and her face hopefully healed up enough that she doesn’t flinch from showing herself, she’s going to get restless.

It’s a Thursday, but late that night Cal sits out on his step and calls Alyssa anyway. He feels dumb doing it, but he’s planning to spend the next day heading miles up a deserted mountainside with a man who’s already helped kill one person and gotten away with it, and who might reasonably consider Cal to be an unacceptable risk. It would be naïve to ignore the situation’s potential, and Cal feels he’s been plenty naïve enough already.

She picks up fast. “Hey. Is everything OK?”

“All good,” Cal says. “Just felt like checking in. How’re you doing?”

“Good. Ben had a second interview for this really great job, so fingers crossed.” Her voice has got farther away, and Cal can hear running water and clinking noises. She’s put him on speakerphone while she goes back to loading the dishwasher. “What’ve you been up to?”

“Nothing much. It’s been raining all week, but it’s cleared up, so I’m planning on going for a walk up the mountains tomorrow. With my neighbor Mart.”

Alyssa says something muffled by her hand over the phone, presumably to Ben. “Oh, wow,” she says, back to Cal. “Sounds beautiful.”

“Yeah, it is. I’ll send you photos.”

“Yeah, do. It’s been raining here, too. Someone at work said it might snow, but I think she made that up.”

Cal drags a hand down his face hard enough to hurt his bruises. He remembers how he used to put Alyssa’s whole little baby foot in his mouth, and she would laugh till she gave herself hiccups. Above his garden, the sky is a mess of high sharp stars.

“You know what,” he says suddenly. “I’ve run into something you might be able to help me with. You got a minute?”

The noises stop. “Sure,” Alyssa says. “What’s up?”

“There’s a neighbor kid who’s been coming round to my place to learn some carpentry. She just found out her big brother died, and she doesn’t have what you’d call a good support system: her daddy’s run off, and her mama hasn’t got much to offer. I want to help her get through this without going off the rails, but I don’t know the best way to do it. I figure you might have some ideas.”

“OK,” Alyssa says. There’s a note in her voice like she’s rolling up her sleeves to get down to work. “How old is she?”

“Thirteen.”

“How did her brother die?”

“Got in a fight and hit his head. He was nineteen. They were pretty close.”

“All right,” Alyssa says. “So the main thing is to let her know that whatever she’s feeling is normal, but direct her away from any action that’s destructive or self-destructive. So for example, it’s natural for her to be angry at herself, her brother, the person he was fighting with, her parents for not protecting him, whoever—make sure she knows that’s fine and she doesn’t need to feel guilty about it. But if she’s lashing out at other kids, say, she needs to know she can’t do that. Help her find another outlet for the anger. Maybe get her into martial arts, or drama. Or running. Hey, you could go running with her.”

The mischievous grin in her voice makes Cal grin back, right across half the world. “Hey,” he says, mock-offended. “I could run. If I wanted to.”

“So do it. Worst case, you’ll give her something to laugh at, and she could probably use that. She’ll be looking for ways to feel like the world can still be normal. Laughing is good.”

All her confidence and competence blow Cal clean away. His baby girl is, somehow, a grown adult who knows how to get shit done and done well; who knows things, and has skills, that he doesn’t. Here he was fretting about her like a mama hen, listening every minute for her to fall to pieces, and all the while she was just tired out from the hard work it’s taken to grow into this. He listens to her talk about regressive behaviors and modeling healthy emotional expression, and pictures her sitting at ease next to some American equivalent of Trey, deftly and calmly transforming all these words into solid action. It seems to him that he can’t have fucked up too badly, if Alyssa turned out like this.

“All of that sounds pretty great,” he says, when she finishes up.

“Well, I’ve had practice. An awful lot of the kids at work, they’ve lost someone, one way or another.”

“They’re lucky to have you around.”

Alyssa laughs her big wonderful laugh. “Yeah, mostly they think so too. Not always. Is any of that going to be useful?”

“Oh yeah. I’m gonna keep every bit of it in mind. Except maybe the running.”

“I can put it in an email, if you want. And if anything specific comes up, like if she starts engaging in risky behaviors or whatever, let me know and I’ll give you whatever strategies I’ve got.”