Chapter 36: One Year Later

Ethan drove to Millbrook before dawn, and brought Gran back to the city in his own car.

She sat in the passenger seat in her church coat, with a jar of pears on her knee and her handbag on top of it.

She had not been to Bayport in a year.

"It's very tall," she said, looking up through the windshield.

"Yes, Gran."

"Does he have a view?"

"He has a window over a bakery. He says the radiator knocks."

"Good. It keeps him awake." She patted the jar. "These are for after."

"After what?"

"After whatever it is you're both too frightened to say."

He kept his eyes on the road.

It had been a year and four days.

Fifty-one Fridays at fourteen C, a bowl of stew on every one of them, and nothing else.

A hand had never once lingered, and Evan's mouth had never come within a foot of his.

It had still been the best year of his life.

He had learned to ask which chair.

He had learned that when Evan stopped mid-sentence and looked at the window, he was not to fill the pause.

The convention hall was the same one.

The same tall doors, the same carpet, the same gala ballroom upstairs, where a coat room waited in a service corridor.

He did not look in that direction.

"Ethie," Gran said. "You've gone red."

"It's warm."

"It's not."

A crowd had gathered in the lobby, and in the middle of it, in a dark suit with no tie, stood Evan.

He was talking to a reporter.

He looked, Ethan thought, quite different, and exactly the same.

He had put on a little weight, in the right places.

The hair still curled at his nape.

His fingers had ink on them.

He saw them across the lobby, and the sentence he was in the middle of did not finish.

He excused himself.

He crossed the carpet with a quick, long stride, and stopped in front of Gran.

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