Chapter 6: The Printout

"Go back to sleep, Solveig," Declan said.

He had not turned from the window.

"You know the route of a siren," I said. "That's a question."

"It isn't. It's a fact I said out loud."

"Those are the same."

"Then you can add it to your list," he said, "and I'll answer it when your rule lets me."

I stood in the doorway a while longer.

The siren faded toward the river, and his shoulders came down by degrees.

I went back to bed.

Bernadette called at nine the next morning, and she did not say hello.

"Come to the house. Alone. I'll make soup, and you tell me anything you want, or nothing at all."

She lived in Edina in a long brick house with a green door and a garden that had gone to seed for the winter.

She opened the door before I knocked.

Without her wool coat she looked smaller, with her reading glasses pushed up into her hair and flour on her sleeve.

She hugged me hard and for a long time.

"I should have said something before," she said into my shoulder. "Years ago."

"Said what?"

"Come sit."

The kitchen smelled of onions.

There was a bowl waiting at my place, and the lemon cake from yesterday sat on the counter with the lid still on the box.

"Nobody cut it," she said. "I couldn't make myself take it home. I drove to the grocery and bought soup stock instead."

I laughed, and she did too, and then her face crumpled and she turned to the stove.

I let her have a minute.

"I watched him," she said when she turned back. "When you started reading page nine. He looked at his watch."

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