Then I’ll close it up.” There was a silence on the line, and in it I could hear her deciding whether to say the thing she wanted to say, and then choosing, as we always chose, the smoother thing.

“Okay, Dad.

Just don’t wear yourself out.” We hung up.

And I sat in the dark of the shop where my wife had lived, holding a phone that had just failed, again, to reach my own child, and I thought about bridges, and about who builds them, and about what happens to the two shores when the bridge goes down.

Chapter 7 — The Machine