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JIMMY INSISTS ON STAYING the night. There’s a brief standoff between us on that, me telling him I’m armed and as dangerous as ever and that whoever did this isn’t coming back, at least not tonight.

Eventually, I give in and tell him he can take the couch.

“But just so we’re clear,” I say, “I let you win this time.”

“And just so we’re clear on something else,” Jimmy says, “I’m not staying because I think he’ll come back. I’m staying because I hope he does.”

Being the good host that I am, I go and get some sheets and a blanket and his pillow and make up the couch for him.

“Do you think Harrington made a call after he left the bar and had this done?” I ask Jimmy.

“Only because I stopped believing in coincidence when I stopped believing in Santa Claus,” he says.

“Wait a second. You’re telling me there’s no Santa Claus!” I say in mock horror.

He nods gravely.

“The Easter Bunny killed him,” he says.

After another brief standoff inside my bedroom with Rip, I allow him to sleep on the bed. Then I make sure that both the front and back doors are locked and that the alarm, which I had neglected to set before I left for Jimmy’s bar, is fully armed now.

Jimmy and I did some cleaning up before I told him he had to stop, we could finish in the morning.

“I hate clutter even when it’s not mine,” he says.

“You want to empty the dishwasher, too?” I ask.

In the darkness of the living room I say, “You still awake?”

“Yeah.”

I walk over and lean down and kiss him on the forehead and thank him for coming right over when I called.

“I had no choice,” he says. “This is where the job was.”

Then he adds, “You’re still too sick for this.”

“Not when I’m pissed off,” I say. “And tonight I am royally pissed off.”

Before I close the door to my room, knowing from other nights like this that Jimmy Cunniff can snore like a champion, I say, “You gonna go see Harrington in the morning?”

“Way ahead of you on that.”

“What does that mean, exactly?”

“It means that that matter will be taken care of shortly.”

“Do I want to know how?”

“How about I surprise you in the morning?” he says. “You know how you love surprises.”

I say, “I hate surprises.”

From the couch he says, “Go to sleep.”

“Easy for you to say,” I tell him.

My version of white noise tonight is the faint sound of Jimmy’s snoring from the other room, and Rip’s from the end of my bed.

When I do finally fall asleep, I dream of hummingbirds.

I dream about hummingbirds a lot, but that’s probably because I think about them a lot.

I take feeding them with the sugar water that I am constantly preparing extremely seriously, like it’s a second job.

But then these birds have informed my life, have had me loving them all the way back to when my mother loved them the way she did when I was a little girl.

I am a little girl in the dream tonight, but I’m living here, in this house, and it’s the fall, and I know the hummingbirds are about to leave, fly back to Mexico until they return in the spring.

Hummingbirds make me want to believe in miracles, just the thought of these tiny birds migrating all that way, those thousands of miles, and then making their way back here.

If that’s not a miracle, I don’t know what is.

In my dream tonight, I’m standing on the back deck near my feeder, and I’m wearing a dress that my mother bought me when I was ten, before she got sick with her own cancer, when she’d take Brigid and me shopping, when we’d do a lot of things together.

And I start to cry in this dream, because the ten-year-old me already has cancer. My mother’s fine but I’m the one who’s sick, and I’m afraid I’ll never see the hummingbirds ever again, because I won’t be here when they come back.

When I awaken in the darkness, I can feel the tears on my cheeks and, for once, I don’t want to go back to sleep, because I’m afraid of how the dream might end.