And Phedra — Phedra turned from where she knelt on the concrete and looked at me as though I were a ghost risen out of the ground, her mouth working, no sound coming, until one word fell out of her.

“Damian…”

I did not look at my mother.

I did not look at my brother.

I crossed that yard in four strides and went down onto my knees beside my wife and gathered her into my arms, and I will never, as long as I live, forget how she felt.

She weighed nothing.

She weighed less than the suitcase I had just dropped.

Under my hands I could feel the architecture of her, the ribs and the sharp blades of her shoulders, and she smelled of bleach and medicine and damp, mildewed cloth — the smell of a shed, I would understand later, the smell of the place they had been keeping her.