CHAPTER ONE

OCTOBER 2018

Dr. Jack Forester had been lying awake, eyes open in the darkness, when the bedroom door creaked open and there came the rustle of small feet on the carpet.

“Julia,” he said.

“I had a bad dream, Daddy,” said the four-year-old.

He lifted her. She was still so light. The clock said four thirty. He smoothed her hair, fragrant with baby shampoo. “Everything’s okay,” he said.

“I thought someone was hiding in the closet.”

“Would you like me to check it again?”

“No,” she said. “I know there’s nothing really there. Can I stay here?”

“Of course.” He slid the covers over her.

“Why don’t I remember what Mommy looked like?”

He inhaled slowly. She’d asked this once before, a few months ago. “Because you were very young,” he said. “That’s why you have her picture in your room, to look at whenever you want.”

“I know, but it won’t stick. When I close my eyes and think about her, all I see is either Aunt Zoë or Kaitlyn.”

Not surprising. There were family resemblances, especially in his niece Kaitlyn’s profile. “You should go back to sleep now,” he said. “I’ve got to get up in a little while and I’ll try not to wake you.”

“Why do you work so much?” she said. “Do you love it?”

“Not as much as I love you.”

“Why don’t you retire? Then you could stay home. Susan’s grandfather retired, but she says he goes golfing all the time.”

“I won’t be able to do that for quite a while.”

“Like when you’re a grandfather?”

“Like then, maybe,” he said. He tried to imagine her all grown up, married, moved away, children of her own. What would she remember of her childhood? He hoped it wouldn’t be of the hours she spent wondering when he would come home.

Sighing, she settled in and her breathing grew regular. He wouldn’t mind dozing off himself, but that was unlikely to happen. Those two scotches and the sleeping pill that used to keep him down till five thirty hadn’t worked again. He should return to exercising in the evenings after work, even if he felt exhausted. He should push through the fatigue instead of ending up in these predawn hours feeling suspended between the past and present, sorting through uncomfortable memories. An odd image came to him of an old man scrubbing dirty socks on a washboard, rinsing them again and again, waiting for the sun to bleach them clean. In any case, the sooner day broke, the better.

The psychiatric literature says that intense grief reactions following the death of a spouse may take six months or even a year to lift. But Zellie’s car accident had happened three years ago, and the pain at times was still as raw and paralyzing as the day he got the phone call. He knew the reason for this. Though he wasn’t in the car with her, he felt responsible for what had happened. He hadn’t shared this sense of responsibility with anyone yet. He knew that keeping it to himself was in some ways cowardly, but he wasn’t sure that sharing would help. More than that, sharing it would force him to cross a line in his mind, beyond which lay something that seemed even more unbearable. So he existed and waited and remembered, letting his life’s compass shrink into the elements that mattered most to him—his daughter and his work—and trying to take care of those things the best he could.

The sudden chirping of his cell phone on the nightstand startled him. Its screen glowed, casting a greenish light on the ceiling. The sound was that of an incoming text.

Julia stirred. “Don’t they ever leave you alone, Daddy?” she mumbled.

That could have only been a phrase she’d picked up from Zoë, the aunt who had been living with them since shortly after his wife’s death, an addition to his household that made a semblance of normal life possible. He sighed and reached for the phone. When he saw who the sender was, his eyes widened. It was Jan Cummings, the university president. He sat up. This was unprecedented. She had never texted him before—and certainly never at such an unusual time. Looks like he wasn’t the only insomniac in New Canterbury this morning. The message was brief and coldly succinct.

Jack—Critical situation involving the med center. Urgent meeting in my conference room at 11:30 a.m. Say nothing till then. Text back to acknowledge.

Blinking, he read it over several times before thumbing a response: I’ll be there.

Julia was sitting up now too and staring at him, her face pale in the screen’s light. “What’s the matter, Daddy?”