Rex came on the third day, and he came correctly.
Helen had rules about visitors the way banks have rules about vaults, and Rex Malone, who had known those rules for years because his club kept the shelter's number taped inside a cupboard door, followed every one of them to the letter. He called ahead. He came at the appointed hour. He came alone, in his truck, in a plain shirt with no vest and no colors and nothing on him that announced anything, and he waited in Helen's office until Mara had been asked — actually asked, by Helen, in private, with the no made as easy as the yes — whether she wanted a visitor at all.
She said yes. She had surprised herself, a little, saying it, and she spent the ten minutes before he arrived discovering that her hands had learned a new trick: they shook now from something that was not fear, and she did not yet have a name for it.
He looked smaller indoors, which is to say he looked like a man. He had a paper sack in one hand that he seemed unsure about, and he gave it to Helen rather than to Mara, which she understood at once and filed somewhere tender: inside it were the things the sheriff's office had released — her hairbrush from the inventory, a paperback she'd left in the diner break room, and a pair of reading glasses she hadn't seen since February, when Wade had put them somewhere for her own good.
"Deputy Collins said these could go," he said. "I was coming this way."
He was not coming this way. The shelter was twenty miles in a direction in which Rex Malone had no business whatsoever, and they both knew it, and neither of them mentioned it, and the kindness of the fiction — its transparent, respectful thinness — made her throat hurt.
They sat in Helen's office with the door open, per the rules, and talked about nothing for a while with great care. The weather. The truck's transmission. Moose's daughter's softball season. Then Mara said, because she had decided, in the night, that she was finished with the management of other people's comfort:
"You knew. That morning. Before he grabbed my arm. You knew from—" She touched her jaw, lightly. "From this. How did you know? You can't have been the only one who ever saw it. Other people saw it. Nobody ever—"
Rex was quiet for a moment. "I had a sister," he said.
He told her about Claire. He told it plainly, the way men who work with their hands tell you how an accident happened — sequence, weather, the part that was his. The Tuesday phone calls. The cookout in July. The platter of corn, and the sleeve riding up, and the smile that stepped in front of the painting. The eleven months of waiting to be asked, because asking was the rule. The funeral home in Grainger County. He did not cry and he did not perform not-crying; he sat with his big hands folded between his knees and gave her the facts like a man handing over tools, one at a time, handle first.
"I waited for her to ask me," he said. "That's the whole of my part in it. I knew, and I waited to be asked, because I didn't want to make it worse, and because I didn't want to be wrong." He shook his head once. "She never got the chance to ask. So when I saw your face — I wasn't going to spend another twenty years being polite about it. I know that doesn't make it mine to decide. It isn't. It never was. That's why—" He stopped.
"Why what?"
"Why it had to be you that said go," he said. "In there. On the steps. I could stand up. Anybody can stand up. But I couldn't leave for you. A person gets taken out of a place like the one you were in, she just ends up in a different place somebody else picked. I've seen that too." He looked at the floor. "You picked. That's the part that's yours. Nobody can take that part back, either."
Mara was quiet a long time. Finally she said, "My mother's photograph."
He waited.
"It's still in that room. Over the garage. The deputies inventoried it but they left it — Sarah said because it's evidence of the room's condition or something, the dust marks. It's the only picture of her I have. She's been gone nine years and it's the only — " She had thought she could say it levelly. She nearly did. "I can't stop thinking about it sitting there. In his house. Where he can—"
"He can't," Rex said. "He's in jail, and there's a paper that says he stays away from you, and the sheriff's got the room sealed. It's safe, Mara. But I hear you. It's yours and it's there, and those two things don't sit right together."
"I want it back."
"Then we'll get it back." He said it without any of the apparatus of rescue, which is to say he said it the way you'd agree to help move a piano. "Here's how I'd see it, and you tell me where I'm wrong. You don't have to go with me. You don't have to go with anybody from the club, or go at all — the sheriff can bring it out, it's your property, that's just a phone call. If you want to go yourself, Deputy Collins will take you, and that's probably the cleanest. And if you want company that isn't a uniform—" he lifted one shoulder, the ghost of the driest humor she had heard in three years "—I can be in the driveway. In the truck. Where you can see me and he can't see anything, on account of being in jail. Your call. All of it. Every part."
She laughed. It startled her — a real one, unplanned, the first she could remember in the new life — at the image of Rex Malone providing security for a photograph from a pickup truck, and at herself, for laughing, and at the fact that it was possible to hold all of it at once: the grief, the absurdity, the safety.
"I'll go with Sarah," she said. "And I'd like you in the driveway."
"Then that's how it'll be," Rex said, and stood to go, because he had also decided, she could see, exactly how long to stay — and he was, in his whole bearing, a man leaving before he was asked to, which she understood was its own form of the same gift.