Page 77 of Wrong Mail

He lets it lie there, and when I don't pick it up he does the thing he does, bringing me almost to the answer and leaving me to cross the last inch myself.

"Say it," he says gently. "You're already thinking it."

"You're describing someone with a medical background."

"I'm describing what the page describes."

"That's not an answer."

"No," he says. “Not exactly.”

He closes the folder, which is worse than leaving it open. It means he's finished. It means he's going to let me hold it now. "I'm not accusing anyone. I'm just showing you what they kept out of the papers." His hand goes flat on the folder. "I'm telling you this is what they kept back about the two people killed next door, and it matches what was buried in Oregon. Almost no one knows what's on this page. I'd rather you were one of the few who did."

The coffee is going cold in my hand. His gentleness is the worst of it. He's taken the thing I've been holding down and laid it out in the medical examiner's words. He has made it a fact I can read, and I can't un-see my husband standing inside it.

The tiredness comes down all at once, as if my body has been waiting all week for permission to stop and has just been handed it. I set the mug down on the island. Suddenly, staying on my feet takes everything I have.

"I'm sorry," I say. "I don't know what's the matter with me. I have to lie down."

"Of course." Henry steps back, giving me room. "You probably haven't slept in days. Go. I'll look in on you later."

He leaves the folder where it is. At the door he pauses. "Don't rush to judgement today, Mallory. You don't have to do one thing with any of it. Just rest."

I see him out into the rain and lock the door behind him. At least, I think I do.

I mean to go up to my bedroom, but I don't make it. The sofa is closer, and the last thing I know is how good it is to stop, and then there's nothing at all.

I come up out of it slow and wrong, my mouth dry, my neck stiff where it was folded against the arm of the sofa. One arm is dead under me. The light through the terrace doors has moved. The rain is still falling hard.

Then the house takes over, the way something wrong does, before I can even name what's wrong with it.

As I move, Luna doesn't come.

I say her name. I say it again into the quiet. Nothing. No nails on the floor, no soft weight arriving against my leg. I'm up and moving before I've decided to be.

The side gate is open.

I can see it from the terrace doors. The gate I know I latched is standing wide open in the rain. Past it, the aviary door hangs open too. There's nothing moving inside where there's always something moving.

I go out into the rain in my socks and I already know.

They're on the floor. All of them. The finches, and the little canary hen that never sang, the one Henry brought to my gate in those first days.

They're laid on the wire floor of the aviary in the wet. There are feathers everywhere, torn loose in the catching. But the bodies aren't flung or dropped. They're set almost in a row, cooling, like something a person had finished with and laid out on purpose. Someone caught them, one by one, and then took the time to arrange them. I stand in the doorway with the rain flattening my hair and I can't make my hands do anything at all.

“Luna?”

There’s no response. She isn’t coming.

I notice Luna's lead is gone off the hook by the gate. She’s gone. I get myself back inside, soaked through, and call David.

David gets home before noon and finds me wrapped in a towel on the sofa, not crying, which is worse. Just numb. The birds are still out there in the rain, because I couldn't make myself move them.

He is very good for the first ten minutes. He holds me. He goes out and looks. Comes back pale and soaked through, and holds me again.

"You fell asleep,” he says. "In the middle of the day?"

"I couldn't keep my eyes open," I say.