Chapter 4: The Husband on My Porch

I did not sleep.

At six in the morning the gate camera chimed again.

I was already dressed and sitting in the front room with my phone propped against a vase.

Zane stood behind the kitchen door where the camera could not see him.

On the screen, Dalton stood alone at the iron bars in the grey light, with his hands hanging at his sides.

He had not shaved.

He looked like a man who had practiced looking sorry in a mirror.

"Let him in," I said.

Zane pressed the button, and the gate swung open.

Dalton walked up the drive slowly.

I opened the front door before he could knock.

For a long moment he only looked at me.

Then his face crumpled, and he went down on his knees on the wet porch step.

"Hal," he said.

Nobody had called me that in three years.

"Hal, I'm alive."

"I can see that," I said.

He grabbed my hand and pressed it against his forehead, and he was shaking.

It was very good.

If I had not stood behind that pillar, I might have believed every shake.

"I woke up in a hospital in Pittsburgh with a broken back," he said. "Four months, Hal. They told my mother I wouldn't walk."

"Your mother knew."

"She hid me. She said the video would ruin us if I came back." He lifted his wet face. "She said you'd moved on."

"You never called."

"I couldn't. I didn't have a phone. I didn't have a name. They had me under somebody else's papers."

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