By late afternoon the house had been mostly put back together. Lucas took the bottles to the recycling bin at the end of the driveway. Ryan vacuumed the living-room rug and stripped the sheets off the guest-room bed where two strangers had crashed. Zoe stayed.
She never put on real clothes. She kept the black t-shirt, sometimes adding a pair of Lucas’s old basketball shorts that hung low on her hips and kept slipping. She moved through their house like she’d always had a key washing the coffee mugs, wiping down the counters, standing at the open back door and watching Mrs. Klein’s lawnmower crawl back and forth across the grass two doors down.
At one point she disappeared upstairs. When she came back the rope was no longer coiled on the nightstand. It was in her hand. She set it on the k
