Adrenaline is a loan, not a gift. It always comes due, and it came due for me sitting on the porch of Jeremiah's house, watching my own hands shake in a way they had flatly refused to do inside the house, like my body had been waiting for permission and only just gotten it.

"Walk me through it again," I said to Jacob, mostly because talking was better than the alternative, which was sitting there listening to my own pulse redecorate my skull. "From the top. Slow."

Jacob was leaning against the porch rail, arms crossed, the bruise on his face finally starting to announce itself now that nothing more urgent was competing for his attention. "The lights went out."

"Right. And then?"

"Something hit me."

"I know something hit you, Jacob, I was there, I got the sequel. I need the something. Height. Build. Anything."

Here is a thing nobody tells you about the worst night of your life: it doesn't have the decency to stop being the worst. It just piles on.

The parking lot lights came back on eleven minutes after they went out — I know because I counted, because counting things is what I do when my hands won't stop shaking and my brain needs somewhere to put itself that isn't my sister is gone. Eleven minutes. Long enough for a coordinated abduction. Short enough that the hospital's night security guard, jogging out to find two grown men on the pavement and no idea why, still had his coffee in his hand. He offered me a sip. I have never wanted anything less in my life and I have wanted very few things as much as I wanted him to stop asking if we were okay.

We were not okay. My…

The lights went out all at once, which is not a thing that happens by accident in a parking lot with its own dedicated electrical service, and I registered that fact about half a second before I registered anything else that mattered.

Half a second, it turned out, was already too long.

Something hit Jacob first. I didn't see it coming — nobody could have, not in that dark, not at that speed — but I heard it, a sound like a car door slamming except wetter, heavier, and I saw my brother's enormous frame go sideways in a way I had genuinely never once seen it go in thirty years of watching him absorb things that would have ended other men. He didn't fall. He staggered, which from Jacob was its own kind of alarm bell, a landmark suddenly discovering it could move.

I turned toward him. That was…

Chapter 1 - David Isaac He was smaller than I expected, which is a strange thing to say about a baby, since I had no real basis for what to expect in the first place, but there it is. Six weeks early, according to the nurse who kept saying it in the specific reassuring tone medical professionals reserve for numbers that sound worse than they are. Six pounds, one ounce. Ten fingers. Ten toes, which Jacob counted twice, out loud, with the solemnity of a man auditing a ledger he could not afford to get wrong.

"He's fine," the doctor had said, for maybe the fourth time, to a father who did not appear capable of hearing it as a settled fact rather than a hope in progress. "Early, small, a little jaundiced, nothing that time and the incubator won't handle. We just want eyes on him for a few days."

We ended up back in the living room after the dishes, the way we always did, Rebecca moving through with the coffee tray like a woman who had simply decided, decades ago, that a full house required full cups regardless of the hour. She set a mug of hot cocoa in front of Roiya without being asked, the small ceremony of a mother remembering, correctly, exactly what her daughter had liked before any of this started.

"Nathanial Lim was buried this morning," Jeremiah said, into the settling quiet, the same flat register he'd used weeks before to first tell us he'd died. "I saw the notice."

I hadn't expected the name to land the way it did — not with grief, exactly, not for a man who'd tried to break my brother's spirit and very nearly succeeded in worse than that. But it landed anyway, heavy, the specific weight of…

Roiya was at her desk when I got to the office the next morning.

I want to describe how that felt, because I don't think I have language sturdy enough for it and I'm going to try anyway: I hadn't seen her at that desk — the one we'd kept for her, the one that had sat empty and dust-free and stubbornly hopeful for the better part of a year — since before any of this had properly started. She was going through old case files, actually reading them, the focus of a person reacquainting herself with a life she'd half-abandoned and was surprised to find had kept a place for her the whole time.

I did not make a production of my joy. I want that on the record, because it cost me considerable effort.

Instead I picked up a mountain of old notebooks from the corner of my…

An hour later, people had started thinking about leaving.

I know that because I was one of them. Rachel had shifted beside me, that particular pre-departure settling a body does when it's decided an evening has reached its natural end, and Rebecca had begun the low-grade domestic choreography of clearing mugs that always preceded goodbyes in that house. Nothing dramatic. Just the ordinary tide going out after a good evening, the kind that usually meant everyone drove home a little lighter than they'd arrived.

Roiya stood up first.

I thought, for one terrible half-second, that she was leaving — the old pattern reasserting itself, the crack sealing back over before it could finish becoming a door. I watched Curtis's face do the thing it always did in that moment, bracing without meaning to, and I felt my own chest do the same.

She didn't move toward the door.

"I want…

Roiya came to dinner that Thursday.

I want to tell you I had some premonition of it, some machine-given certainty that this particular Thursday was going to be different from the last dozen that had come and gone with her chair standing empty. I didn't. I was elbow-deep in a bag of rolls Rebecca had asked me to carry in from the car when I heard the front door open a second time behind me, and I turned around, and there she was.

Roiya. Standing in the doorway of the house she'd been accepted into, looking like she wasn't entirely sure the floor was going to hold her weight.

Rebecca reached her first, the way Rebecca reaches everyone first, and pulled her into a hug that Roiya didn't quite return but didn't pull away from either, which by the standards of the last several months counted as an embrace of…

Please add your prayers for my father, suffered a minor strok last night, but is recovering today at the hospital, probably home tomorrow. That 90-yr-old man just keeps chugging along.