The clinic was twelve minutes from the house.
Nathan had driven it that morning in the specific, forward-facing silence of a man moving toward something he had decided to do and was not going to spend the drive reconsidering. He drove it now in a different kind of silence — the retrospective quiet of the same man having done the thing and sitting inside the reality of what doing it meant. The swab in the tube. The blood drawn. The seven to ten business days stretching out ahead of them like a corridor with a closed door at the end.
Maryanne was in the passenger seat with her hands in her lap and her face turned toward the window. He was aware of her in the peripheral way he had been aware of her all morning — the specific, sustained awareness of a man in close proximity to a situation he
