Page 54 of The Night We Lost Him

“I’m back.”

“What were you doing in California?”

“That’s a long story.”

“I dropped Austin back at his mother’s,” he says. “I’ve got nothing but time.”

I hear him adjust his position, his voice getting lower, like he’s lying down. And I can picture him there, his arm behind his head, long legs hanging off the bed, his glasses beside him on the bedside table.

“Can I ask you something first?” I say. “Do you remember the last time you saw my father?”

“Where did that come from?”

“Part of the long story.”

He pauses, considering. “We grabbed dinner probably five or six weeks ago.”

I sit up, taller. It isn’t weird that Elliot and my father saw each other that recently. They’d often run into each other in their building. And they stayed close. Shortly after Elliot and I ended things, my father made sure that their continued friendship was okay with me. I had no problem with it. When my father let someone in, the way he had let Elliot in, he didn’t like to turn them out.

“Wait,” I say. “So two weeks before he died?”

“Something like that. Why?”

“Do you remember what you talked about?”

“What we talked about?”

I try to get more specific, figure out what I want to know. “Did you talk about his work at all?”

“Not much. Nora, what’s going on?”

“There are some things that aren’t adding up about how he died, so I’m just trying… I’m pulling at every thread to see what I’m missing. Or what I missed.”

“Okay…” I hear the concern in his voice. “Well, your father definitely asked about Austin,” he says. “We talked a little about what was happening at the hospital. I think he asked about a patient of mine—”

“He didn’t say that anything was upsetting him?”

“He didn’t really talk much about himself. You know how your father was. He wanted to know what was going on with me.”

That was true. My father did always like to focus on whoever he was with, especially the people he cared the most about. But, suddenly, I’m not sure that’s the entire reason he tended to stay quiet. I doubt that I can explain that to Elliot or explain to him how it feels just beyond my grasp—what I’m missing about what was happening with my father, at the very end. How I’m increasingly certain that if I can figure that out, the rest of what I want to know about him will follow.

“Can I ask you something else? Do you have someone at the hospital who studies fall patterns? Like a pathologist who could look at an autopsy report and help me determine if someone fell or was pushed?”

“Okay, this conversation took a weird turn,” he says.

“Hey there…”

Jack’s voice jolts me, and I drop the phone. I turn to see him standing in our doorway, between the open door and the screen. His hair is rumpled, his feet bare. The house is dark behind him, Jack looking too much like a shadow from where I’m sitting on the porch steps.

“Holy shit,” I say. “You scared me half to death.”

“Didn’t mean to. I come in peace.”

I scoop up the phone and click off the call without saying goodbye. “I thought you were still at the restaurant,” I say.

He walks onto the porch, sits down next to me on the front steps. “I cut out early,” he says. “I wanted to be here when you got back.”

I’m still working to catch my breath when the phone buzzes in my hand, ELLIOT coming up on the screen. I click decline as Jack looks at the phone in my hand and then back up at me. Not saying anything.