We had hardly even celebrated New Year’s, watching the ball drop on television. Out on the freezing deck, we shared a cigarette that Elise had bummed from a nurse at the hospital and watched some distant fireworks explode soundlessly across the bay. And then there was nothing but a half moon and the blinking red light of the Coast Guard antenna measuring its own steady beat. We kissed each other and she hurried back inside, leaving me with the last of the cigarette. I smoked it down to the filter, looking at the dark slope of Swain’s roof, imagining the cold rooms and moonlit furniture. Then I gathered our champagne glasses from the railing and followed Elise inside.

For different reasons, we didn’t sleep much that week, but I think it was a Sunday night, a couple of days after that extremely low-key New Year’s, that she turned toward me in the middle of the night and announced the news.

“He wants to die at home,” she said.

I had been fantasizing about blackmailing Richard Swain. Because I figured it was Richard Swain who had murdered his wife. I had all the little details nailed into place in my mind, right down to the obsolete phone booth near the supermarket I’d use to make the first call. I could even imagine the sound of his voice. The silence he’d impose on me after I mentioned the blood. Elise would be sitting in the Volvo, waiting for me, as excited as she’d been when we first trespassed into the house next door. If we were going to save our marriage, we had to keep the adrenaline going, and having her father return to die at home would derail that instantly.

“Why would he want to do that? What’s wrong with the hospital?”

“Because this is his home,” Elise said. “This is his bedroom. He wants to be where he feels comfortable. Not some depressing hospital.”

“What can I say?” I said. “Any particular day he was thinking of making the move?”

“You’re an asshole.”

“I’m not,” I said, reaching for her hand in the dark. She snapped it away.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “I’m assuming you’re willing to help. You don’t have any pressing obligations?”

“I don’t think so.”

We lay there for a few more minutes, lost in our thoughts. I felt sure she was thinking of what it would be like at the very end for her father, and whether she’d be able to handle it.