Chapter 21: The Night After

Anson's POV

Dot took Tilda to the hospital for the night, and told us to keep the cottage.

"A bed with a nurse in it is what that girl needs," she said at the door.

"Don't burn my kitchen down."

Then she was gone, and the boathouse was very quiet.

Jo went into the back bedroom a little after midnight.

She shut the door.

I heard the latch click.

I sat down on the floor of the hall with my back to the wall, the way I had on the first night.

I faced the opposite wall.

I did not listen.

I counted the knots in the pine boards, and I got to forty before I heard her moving around in there.

She walked the room.

She sat on the bed, and the springs creaked.

She got up again.

An hour went by.

The sheriff's cruiser had taken Helena out of the club lot at nine.

I had watched her in the back seat through the glass, upright, with her hands in her lap.

I thought of the girl behind this door, who had spent three years with that woman standing outside hers.

At two in the morning the latch clicked.

The door opened.

Jo stood in the lamp-dark in my gray T-shirt, with her arms wrapped around her ribs.

"I can't sleep," she said.

"I know. I could hear you."

"You weren't supposed to listen."

"I wasn't. I was counting the wood."

She almost smiled.

"Mom's in a cell," she said. "I keep thinking she's going to be in the hall."

"She isn't."

"I know she isn't. It's silly."

"It isn't silly."

I stayed where I was on the floor.

She looked down at me for a long time.

"I've shut a door by myself for a week," she said. "I'd like to try opening one."

"Jo."

"Come in, Anson."

I stood up slowly, because my knees had gone strange.

She stepped back from the doorway, and I walked into the room where the moon came across the bedspread.

She shut the door behind me and did not lock it.

She left it ajar, with the hall light making a thin gold line on the floor.

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