They stayed in a different motel on their way home from the mountain, and Mimi tried to cuddle him as he lay in the bed, but her wings got in the way, and he edged over to his side until he was almost falling off before she took the hint and curled up on her side. He lay still until he heard her snore softly, then rose and went and sat on the toilet, head in his hands, staring at the moldy grout on the tiled floor in the white light, trying not to think of the bones, the hank of brittle red hair, tied tightly in a shopping bag in the trunk of the rental car. Sunrise found him pacing the bathroom, waiting for Mimi to stir, and when she padded in and sat on the toilet, she wouldn't meet his eye. He found himself thinking of her standing in the tub, rolled towel between her teeth, as Krishna approached her wings with his knife, and he went back into the room to dress. "We going to eat breakfast?" she asked in the smallest voice. He said nothing, couldn't will himself to talk. "There's still food in the car," she said after some silence had slipped by. "We can eat that." And without any more words, they climbed into the car and he put the pedal down, all the way to Toronto, stopping only once for gas and cigarettes after he smoked all the ones left in her pack. When they cleared the city limits and drove under the viaduct at Danforth Avenue, getting into the proper downtown, he eased off the Parkway and into the city traffic, taking the main roads with their high buildings and stoplights and people, people, people. "We're going home?" she said. The last thing she'd said was, "Are you hungry?" fourteen hours before and he'd only shook his head. "Yes," he said. "Oh," she said. Was Krishna home? She was rooting in her purse now, and he knew that she was looking for her knife. "You staying with me?" he said. "Can I?" she said. They were at a red light, so he looked into her eyes. They were shiny and empty as marbles. "Yes," he said. "Of course. And I will have a word with Krishna." She looked out the window. "I expect he'll want to have a word with you, too." # Link rang his doorbell one morning while he was hunched over his computer, thinking about the story he was going to write. When he'd moved into the house, he'd felt the shape of that story. All the while that he'd sanded and screwed in bookcases, it had floated just below the surface, its silhouette discernible through the ripples. But when Adam left Mimi watching television and sat at his desk in the evening with the humming, unscuffed, and gleaming laptop before him, fingers poised over the keys, nothing came. He tapped out an opening sentence, I suspect that my father is dead and deleted it. Then undid the delete. He called up The Inventory and stroked the spacebar with his thumb, paging through screensful of pictures and keywords and pricetags and scanned-in receipts. He flipped back to the story and deleted his sentence.