In the middle of the night, she stirred and sat up cross-legged at the edge of the mattress. She clicked on the flashlight.

“Nothing’s going to make it any different,” she said. “I can say it all day and it doesn’t matter.” Her words came out with almost no space between them—a stream of syllables—and she swung the beam of the flashlight against the walls. “Tell me I can’t press charges? Tell me? I’ll get the courts here thirty years later.”

“Laura,” Eddie said.

“I’ll get them. He’s going to jail.”

He shook her shoulder and the flashlight fell to the floor and rolled against the mattress so that there was only a small disk of light glowing.

She lay back down, but crooked, her legs up where her head had been. Her forehead was sticky and hot and her hair was plastered there.

Eddie went upstairs and fumbled through the cabinet, pulling the handle of the faucet up and down without even looking. When he opened the refrigerator door, the air was as warm as the air in the room. He poured the bottle of lemon juice into a glass and took a gulp that made him shudder.

There was still a can of mushrooms and the can of black beans, and he opened them and held a colander over a glass. The liquid poured through like syrup, and in the darkness, the glass was almost invisible. He stirred it and brought it down to her, kneeling on her side of the mattress.

“Laur,” he said, shaking her shoulder. “Come on, Laura.”

“Oh,” she said.

He put the light down against the mattress so that there would only be the slightest glow.

“Eddie. I feel bad.”

“What hurts?”

“My hands are tingling.”

“Give me,” he said, and he took her hands in his and massaged down her knuckles with his thumb.

“Drink this,” he said, lifting the glass from the floor.

“What is it?”

“Just drink. It’s okay.”

He held her head up and took the glass to her lips.

“Uhn,” she said, and wrinkled her face.

“You have to,” Eddie said. “You’ve got to get it down.”

He could feel her heat against his skin, slightly hotter than the heat in the room.

She drank and Eddie watched her feet flex. She got through half of it.

Then he lay still on the mattress, listening to her breathing. It was steady, but every so often, she rasped. When she coughed, Eddie’s stomach tightened.

Upstairs, her phone was turned off, and when he tried to press it on, nothing happened. The moon lit up the street through the picture window. He heard voices coming from the Mathiases’ and looked across into their yard.

It was kids again. He’d watched Mr. Mathias before—large and stiff-necked—silence the innocuous street chatter of stroller-moms by merely opening his door. Now these kids were in his yard and his door remained closed. Eddie checked the lock. The can on the back door knob was balanced where it was—the sofa beneath it, unmoved.

When the voices died out, he went downstairs and felt Laura’s forehead. It had cooled, but the commotion he’d made hadn’t roused her.