He walked to the mantel, braced an arm against it, and lowered his head like a man in prayer. So, it was today. A late-summer funeral in Oak Grove Presbyterian Cemetery. A small group of mourners, I imagined. Both living brothers … absent.

I pictured the cemetery and I remembered Seth saying he had a plot there. I remembered him alive. Could it be that he was in the ground?

I went to Nate and we seized one another.

“Oh, God,” he said, clutching my back so hard it hurt. “I couldn’t go. You saw it coming. I didn’t. God help me. Now it’s done. Hannah…” Nate cried in a terrible, suppressive way, with breathless, gasping gulps. I told him no one saw it coming. I told him no one could have done anything. Gradually, he let himself weep unrestrained. His tears dampened my hair.

We swayed together and his sadness and my hollow reassurances faded to silence.

Motion caught my eye.

I jolted away from Nate.

Matt stood in the library doorway, staring at us.

“M-Matt,” I said. His eyes were calm and clear. I flapped my hands. “Hi. We—we were just being sad together.”

“Matt.” Nate wiped his face hurriedly.

“Let me get this,” I whispered. I scurried over to Matt and kissed him. “You want to sit with us? We made a fire.” He shook his head, and after a moment he turned toward his room. “Okay, we can go back. I’ll go with you.”

I trailed Matt back to his room and he sank into the armchair.

His MacBook stood open on the table.

“Were you online?” I sat on his lap and pulled the notebook onto my thighs. He gazed off at nothing while I studied the screen. I hoped to find he’d been writing, but no such luck. A Wikipedia page on Virginia Woolf was open. He’d scrolled down to …

“Matt, baby … why are you looking at this?”

I tried to make him look at me. He wouldn’t, or couldn’t.

He’d highlighted section four of the Woolf entry, DEATH. It summarized her suicide by drowning and contained a transcript of her last note to her husband.

Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again … I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier …

“No, listen to me…” I closed the tab and cleared the browsing history. I shut off his laptop and glanced toward the library. Nate was deliberately not paying attention, his back to us but his head inclined. “Darling,” I whispered. “You can’t look at things like that. They’ll take you away from me. Please, don’t you understand? I need you here with me.” I stroked his face and pressed soft kisses all over it. “Come to bed with me.”

When I led him toward the bedroom, Nate stepped into the hall and eyed us warily.

“Everything all right?”

“Fine,” I said.

Chapter 32

MATT

On Friday morning, Mike, Hannah, and Nate filed into my study.

They brought chairs and sat.

I grimaced and tossed my book onto the desk.

“I was reading,” I said.

“Well, good morning to you, too,” said Mike. He grinned at me, then at Hannah and Nate. “Surprised you’re home at this hour. Is that new?”

“Quite,” said Nate.

“Sort of…” Hannah flushed and I wanted to laugh. I’d been home last night, when, for whatever reason, she’d become determined to have sex. I hadn’t wanted sex in weeks—but Hannah applied her hands and mouth vigorously, and then she rode me like her life depended on it. We came. I fell asleep. Experiment over, I suppose.

But I did grasp her wrists in the heat of pleasure. I did sit upright and meet her gaze and scrape my teeth along her throat. Yes, I enjoyed that feeling, a touch of death, and I missed it.

“I wanted you to see these.” Hannah offered a stack of printed pages to Mike. What were they? I tried to get a look. “It’s a story he and I have been writing. This chapter—”

My hands tightened, nostrils flared.

Everyone looked at me.

Mike said, “You don’t mind if I read this, do you?”

In response, I snatched the pages—Chapter 10 of our untitled novel—crumpled and tossed them on the floor. Hannah laughed. Nate smiled broadly and Mike chuckled.

“The fuck?” I spat. “You look like a bunch of clowns.”

“I’ll give you the gist,” Hannah said. “He has this idea, this belief, ‘deeply held,’ he wrote, that the price of happiness is pain. From what I can gather, he blames the happiness of his early childhood for the loss of his parents.”

I disliked the direction of the conversation.

“Very disordered thinking,” Mike said. “Black-and-white. Typical for him.”

Typical for me?

I felt like a specimen.

I wanted to leave, but for the first time in a while, I also wanted to stay.

“And once, when we were talking about whether or not we wanted children, he said, ‘We have to be careful. We could be too happy.’ Something like that.”

Nate chimed in with some unhelpful bullshit about my childhood.

All three of them began to discuss me openly, encouraging and questioning one another.

“I’m fine,” I snarled into their dumb conversation.

Mike barely glanced at me.

Hannah mentioned Seth, and Nate said, “I’m sure Matt blames himself.”