Page 40 of Wrong Mail

"Whoa, it's Henry. Henry Westburn. It's okay.”

I hit him anyway. I get a fistful of shirt and I pull. I’m making a sound I've never made, and he doesn't fight me. He just stays there, crouched, taking it. He keeps saying my name in that low voice until it starts to mean something.

"It's over," he says. "One of them ran. The other's down out back, but he's not getting up. Nobody's going to hurt you. There's nobody here now but me."

Henry gets me into a chair.

The power comes back, rising to a steady amber. That's when I see it. The devastation. The kitchen assembles itself around me, all of it wrong. The island has been shoved out of square, and my stool is on its side. My laptop lies face down on the floor, the wine spilled across the counter. The terrace doors stand open with the rain coming straight in, one pane knocked clean out of the frame. Glass is scattered across the boards, and watery footprints track through it.

Henry is soaked through. His hair is flat and his shirt is stuck to him. He's bleeding a little from the knuckles of his right hand, but he doesn't seem to notice.

He's on the phone to the police. He gives them the address. He gives them 5261 without asking me for it.

Then he crouches in front of me again and takes my hands. They're shaking so hard they're knocking against each other. He holds them still.

"How are you here?" I ask.

He tilts his head toward the wall next door.

"I want to say I was taking an evening walk, but that's not the whole truth. I couldn't sleep. After the police cleared out tonight, even though the place was still taped off, I decided to walk down and take a look. Chew over a few questions. Whether it could be related to the Oregon cases."

He looks toward the broken doors.

"I was standing at the end of their drive when I saw two men through the trees with flashlights. I didn't think much of it." His jaw works once. "Then I heard you scream. So I rushed over."

He steadies, then gives me the rest slowly, in order.

"One went out through the terrace doors and slipped down the steps. He landed badly. The other got away over the fence. I'm just glad you're safe."

I believe him.

I'm sitting in a broken kitchen with a wrecked shoulder and my ears full of the rain. I don't have one single thing in my head I can trust. Not one. He's crouched in front of me, calmly telling me what happened. I take it from him gratefully, like a coat held out in the cold.

"Stay here, I'll be right back," he says.

"What?" I ask.

"I need to make sure no one else is here."

I nod.

He moves quickly through the house, room by room. I hear him in the hall, then the rooms beyond it, then the gutted end where no one goes. I hear him coming back through the dark. Then he steps into the kitchen and shakes his head.

"It's clear. There's no one here now but us."

The sirens start then, thin and far off, coming up the road from Medina.

David gets home at twenty past one.

By then, there are two marked Medina police SUVs in the drive, light bars turning across the front of the house. An ambulance is backed onto the grass with its rear doors open. The police have been at the back of the house for a long time. Earlier, two medics brought the intruder around from the terrace on a board, strapped and collared and not moving. They loaded him into the ambulance without hurrying.

I'm wrapped in a blanket from our sofa, sitting on the porch step. I watch David come up the drive.

He's out of the car before it stops rolling. He runs. That's the first thing, he runs, and something in me that's been clenched all night lets go a little, because he's running.

And then he gets to the porch and stops.

He looks at me in the blanket. He looks at the officer with the notebook. He looks past both of us into the house, at the open doors, the glass, the water on the floor. Then he goes very still.