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Something shakes in a man when the strongest person in the room cries in front of him. I just told her that’s who she is. This doesn’t change my mind.

And I understand that she’s not crying about me.

So I hold her hand and let her have it, and after a long time she takes one breath that goes all the way down.

“Nobody told me that.”

She says it to the piano and not to me, in a voice with nothing in it.

After a while she nods once at nothing.

My legs have gone from the hip down. Getting up off that floor takes about four stages and she watches me do every one of them without offering to help.

Then I put my hand down to her.

She takes it and I bring her up, and I don’t pull her in, because tonight isn’t that and both of us know it.

We go up. Her door is open four inches and the lamp is still on, throwing its strip across the landing.

Astrid stops in the hall.

I go in. The kid is on her side with one arm off the edge of the mattress and the drawing taped up on the wall over the desk. I turn the lamp off and come back out and pull the door to exactly where it was.

Astrid hasn’t moved. She’s standing six feet away and she has watched every second of it, the way a person watches something they’re going to need to remember.

She doesn’t tell me I did it wrong.

“Come to bed, Astrid.”

I don’t put a question in it and I don’t leave her a door, and she stands there in the dark outside her daughter’s room and looks at me.

Then she takes my hand and goes down the hall, and she doesn’t let go.

Chapter twenty-nine

Astrid

The fourth clinic is on Fredericksburg Road, and the woman who runs it walks me through the entire building before she asks the question.

She has read my references. She has a treatment room nobody is using. She wants to talk about caseload.

Then she asks when I could start.

“That depends on my work authorization.”

“You don’t have it yet.”

“No.”

She is kind about it. They are all kind about it. She tells me to call her the day it comes through and writes her cell number on the back of her own card, and I put it in the folder with the other three.

In the truck I sit with both hands on the wheel before I start it.

Four rooms I could work in. Not one door I am permitted to walk through.

Tova has Colt’s laptop open at the kitchen island when I get home.

A legal pad sits beside it with dates down the left side, names in the margins, and three flight tabs across the top of the screen.