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I make the last trip of the day alone. The storm has begun and Orly needs no convincing to stay home. Fen hates being anywhere near the vault so she too is happy to remain at the lighthouse. But there’s time in the day for another load, and in truth I can’t shake the bad feeling I am getting from Rowan. I can’t shake the image of her emerging, alone, from the vault.

I climb down into the bowels of the world.

He is sitting on the floor with papers on his lap. He is drawing something. I don’t care to know what.

“You’re back,” Hank says, without looking at me.

I had thought maybe I’d be able to tell. That if I looked at him, I could read on his face whether he’d seen his wife for the first time in many months. But I can’t see anything.

“Toilet bucket needs emptying,” he commands. “I need more toothpaste and another notepad.”

Naija used to sit with him and talk to him. She said it was important for his mental health. She also said she needed to try to make sense of what he did, and what he wanted. For herself, she needed to understand what his own internal logic was, assured me that no one was “just crazy.” I don’t know if she worked it out, before she died. I never cared to know.

But it occurs to me now that Rowan will need the same answers. That she will expect me to know them, to have at least tried to know them.

“What gets me,” I say, instead of asking him anything, “is that in your psychosis you had to drag my seventeen-year-old daughter down with you.”

Hank looks up at me. Smiles a smile of infinite wisdom. “I know it’s easier to tell yourself I’m crazy, but I’m not,” he says. “And none of that matters. It’s so small. Don’t you get it? Of course you don’t, you’re a dumb thug. Let me spell it out: we’re all fucked. We’re dead. Everything is dead. All life: drowned, burned, or starved.”

I feel a chill run down my spine at the recognition of these words. I don’t understand how Rowan could have loved this piece of pond scum, of animal shit. I wish she didn’t see the world the same way he does, with such bleakness. But I do know how to answer his proclamation.

“Maybe we will drown or burn or starve one day, but until then we get to choose if we’ll add to that destruction or if we will care for each other.”

He isn’t listening to me, but I don’t expect him to. He never did.

I get home, drenched and dripping. I remove my outer layers in the mudroom and then climb the stairs to Fen’s room, which is now Rowan’s room. I don’t know where my kids are. I am shivering with the cold. I find Orly and Rowan sleeping beside each other. I crouch quietly by her face. She wakes with a start, and for a moment in the dark it’s like she’s expecting someone else or doesn’t recognize me.

“You’re wet,” she murmurs.

I nod. I can feel the drops sliding from my hair onto my face. I can feel them trickling icily down my spine.

“How are you feeling?” I ask her.

She shrugs.

I want to run my hands over her hair, but something stops me. It is possible she knows her husband is beneath the vault. It is possible she thinks I am the beast who keeps him locked up. It’s possible she knows nothing at all, that she’s just feeling unwell. Either way, there is a boat traveling toward us, it will be here any day now and it will carry us away from here, and if she’s right, if Rowan—and Hank—are right that the world we are returning to is a hostile place intent on our ends, then there are things that need to be said.

“If we don’t have a lot of time left,” I say. “If there’s nowhere safe to go back to—”

She doesn’t let me say it. “I feel sick. I feel so, so sick, Dom.”

“What can I do?”

“Leave. I want to be alone.”

“Okay. I’ll tell you in the morning.”

She looks at me and very clearly says, “This was a mistake. Me and you. Me and your family. And what’s worse, I knew better.”

I swallow. The world is spinning a little. “You’re wrong,” I say. “You’re only with him because it feels safer to be with someone you don’t love, but that’s not smart, it’s cowardly.”

She rolls away, muttering, “I told you I was a coward, didn’t I?” and I can feel that this is the end. She means this to be the end.

I reach for Orly, but she shakes her head, laying a hand on his back. “He can stay.”

Perhaps he is the only one she felt a true love for.

My wife is waiting for me in my room.

“Fuck,” I say, on a breath.

She is at my elbow, reaching for me, but I don’t want this.

“You’re not real. This isn’t real.”

If you could have me back, flesh and blood, would you want me?

“Don’t ask me that.”

I can smell her and it fills me with an old longing.

Am I so easily replaced? Was it just a mother for your kids that you wanted?

“Don’t. I loved you long before we had children and I have loved you after.”

Still?

“Always. But I want something real.”

It will never be real. It will kill her, when she knows what you’ve done. You will have killed us both.

She has been in labor for thirty-two hours when I am told that the baby is in distress. She can keep laboring and do this vaginally but it’s likely the baby won’t survive. It is not, however, as simple as giving the go-ahead for an emergency C-section. With a surgery like that the surgeons are in danger of rupturing the tumors inside her, the ones we have known about for a few months. The existence of these tumors, these cancers, required a swift decision at twenty weeks to terminate the pregnancy so she could be operated on before the tumors got any bigger. But my wife. Oh, my wife. She is too brave for her own good. Too naive, too ruled by optimism. She wouldn’t terminate, and she wouldn’t die, either. She decided they were both going to make it through. She promised me it wouldn’t come to this decision. But it has. And it has fallen to me, because my poor wife is so exhausted she is in no state to make a lucid choice.

My immediate instinct is to tell them to save Claire. That we can make another baby, but we can’t make another her. We already have two children to think about, and they need their mother.

But I know, I can’t pretend not to know, that this isn’t what she wants.

She told me what she wants, she has been telling me for months. She’s even made a declaration to that effect, and signed it, and I could supersede that document if I wanted to. It’s not possible to articulate how much I want to, and the doctors are looking at me to decide, they know what she wants but they’re giving me the choice, and it is this more than anything that makes it clear to me. She deserves to have her wishes respected. She deserves to have the person who loves her most in the world listen to her. So I tell them to save the baby, to cut him out, and I tell them not to kill her in the process, I warn them that I will come after them if they rupture a single tumor, if she does not wake up tomorrow, but of course that isn’t within their power to promise. I kiss her, I say her name and I tell her it will be okay, I kiss her more, on her mouth and her eyelids and her cheeks, her eyes are rolling back in her head and this feels so wrong, she is reaching for me and I am holding her face in my hands but they are removing me now, making me put on a gown and cap and scrubbing my hands sterile and by the time I get into the operating room she has gone. They have tried and they have failed, and she does not wake up.

But.

There is something else drawing breath. Bravely swimming his way to the surface to find her. She will not be there to meet him, but I can be.

I can be.