Vikram was going to be home—it was a Saturday, after all, this chilly first day of May—but he’d said he would stay out of the way. So the camera crew (one man, hardly a crew) followed Bob and the interviewer, a bobble-headed woman wearing more makeup than Hartfield usually saw on a weekend—Cherise was her name—around the driveway and into their open garage. Rachel trailed behind as Cherise pointed at where the car had been, that morning of the accident, and Bob nodded. Then they both bent down, hands on knees, to study the cement floor while the cameraman circled around them—as if pretending to be forensic experts on one of those TV shows, Rachel thought. Actually, she half hoped the two of them would spot a clue—a strand of Bob’s hair, a speck of his blood—that would solve everything, all at once.

Melissa and Gwen Torres, from two doors down, were in and out of the Brigham’s side entrance, walking past the camera activity many more times than was necessary, looking nonchalant. This Saturday was an off week for the diving team, but Lila had made such a horrified expression when Bob had explained what the local news team wanted to film, for a “miracle recovery” segment, amplified by writing success—a few shots of him at home, describing the accident—that Rachel had quickly granted permission for her to go over to a friend’s house.

Her own job, as Rachel saw it, was to stand nearby and look appropriately grave as Bob described that day, and then warm and supportive in turn, when the discussion moved to his recovery. Cherise had said to dress “normally”—“like you would on any other Saturday at home.” So Rachel was wearing jeans, but also a rust-colored jacket and shiny black flats. She hoped the jacket was echoing the fading red in her own hair, but it was too dressy, and even too warm, for the day. Melissa had finagled makeup from somewhere—she and Gwen were plastered with lip gloss and a heavy black eyeliner; Rachel shot her daughter a look when she noticed this, but Mel just shrugged and grinned, knowing she’d gotten away with it.

Rachel was still shaken by the conversation earlier today, when Cherise had arrived. Rachel had started to point out the difference between where Vikram lived and her family’s side apartment, and that this was obviously just one of the setbacks they’d suffered since Bob had to take the year off from the firm. The cameraman was snapping digital images of the front of the house and squinting at them; Cherise was clipping a microphone to the front of her blouse, frowning.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “We just need a few shots here, and we’ll be outside for all of it, probably.”

“Right,” Rachel said. “But…won’t that be explained? By us, or you, I mean?” She had envisioned some kind of voice-over, sober and sympathetic.

“Not necessarily. The story is your husband and his recovery and his book. Local man has near-death experience, makes good.”

“Well, I know. But—you’ll be shooting us here,” Rachel said, flustered, gesturing to the front of their home, Vikram’s home. “Where it happened. And we don’t live here anymore.”

Cherise nodded affably. This was all beside the point. “The whole segment is ninety seconds,” she said, fluttering her fingers. “We don’t have time to get into all the details.”

Now Bob was pointing to the back corner of the house where he had presumably used the ladder to clean the blocked gutter. Cherise followed with an intent expression, one she dropped instantly when the shot was over.

“I think we’ve got enough of the exteriors,” she said, and the cameraman lowered his equipment.

Bob was still talking and gesturing. “Usually there are other witnesses, when someone has an accident like that. But if I hadn’t known how badly I was hurt, if I was just walking around for several more minutes after it happened—putting the ladder away, or moving around in the yard—any one of our neighbors could have seen me, could have even stopped to talk to me, before I went inside and collapsed.”

Cherise smiled, but her eyes were elsewhere.

“I don’t know; that kind of bothers me,” he went on. Bob was in khakis and a polo shirt; Rachel restrained the urge to fix his collar. “That someone could be so…” He trailed off, searching for the words, not noticing that Cherise and the cameraman had walked away. As Rachel watched him, the thought finished itself in her own head: that someone could be so messed up on the inside and still look perfectly normal.

Exactly. It was how she felt sometimes. Were they actually in sync? Rachel had gotten used to their being so at odds. But coming at it from opposite directions, maybe she and Bob would somehow arrive at the same place.

Cherise and the cameraman were conferring, close by the front door. Rachel saw Vikram’s dark head pass by one of the upstairs windows. She thought of Winnie, wished she was here. Winnie would have promptly washed Melissa’s face and found a better top for Rachel to change into. Maybe she would have sweet-talked her way into the interview, delighted by the attention. Maybe the minor excitement of this local news team—Rachel had seen passersby on Locust slow with curiosity when they saw the white W-NEF van in the driveway—would have lifted her mother’s spirits, for just a few minutes, away from the slow unending sadness of Jerry and Greenham Avenue. He couldn’t have much longer, Rachel thought, and maybe that was a blessing. Though certainly her mother couldn’t admit that, wasn’t able to face any part of it.

Cherise motioned them up the front steps. “We’ll just do a few shots inside, maybe have you two moving around the kitchen.”

Rachel was swept with outrage. “That’s just—there’s no—”

Bob shoved his hands into his pockets. “It’s still our house, Ray.”

“Everyone will see,” she sputtered. “Everyone who watches this, will see us in our old house, and they’ll say something about it.”

“Say something to whom?”

“To each other! It’ll look like a joke, the way we’re just merrily pretending to cook an omelet or something, in our old kitchen!”

“You won’t need to interview,” Cherise called. “We’ll do some silent shots of the two of you, so I can put some voice-over in later.”

“No,” Rachel said in a low voice. She and Bob stood together, set apart from the others, at the front door. Out on the front sidewalk, Melissa was watching them.

A sudden nausea trickled through Rachel. It hit her that it wasn’t just their old wonderful kitchen that she was refusing, the idea of being there again, not for real, but to playact a happy home while Cherise eyed the furnishings and Vikram kept tactfully out of the way. It was having to enact her marriage in front of the camera, when she wasn’t sure how to play her role anymore. Rachel watched herself and Bob in her head, as she knew it would appear on television—the shock of Bob’s bald head and his white scar, his tentative smile, her own frozen, fake responses. No. She couldn’t pretend, with him, in that kitchen, that nothing had changed since they had lived together in this part of the house.

His eyes met hers. They were warm, open. Was it only two weeks since that odd, lovely, embarrassing hour in 50 Greenham?

“Okay,” Bob said so that only she could hear. “Okay.”

What had he written in one of the last chapters? Harder than the recovery, harder than the memory loss, is what it means to not know the answers to every question: how? And why?

“We’re never going to know,” she said to him. “Are we? How it happened. We’ll never get closer to it, and we’ll never be able to find out.”

He waited, but she said nothing more. “Are you okay with that?”

“I don’t know,” Rachel said. “Do I have to be?” They were almost whispering.

After a moment, Bob called “Let’s do something else,” to Cherise, keeping his eyes on Rachel.

Cherise began some kind of protest, some argument, but Bob just shook his head. “We’re not up for the kitchen today. Got another idea?” His tone was mild but final. As they walked back down the stairs to the interviewer and cameraman, to their daughter and her friend, Rachel felt Bob put a hand on the back of her neck.