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She catches me looking.

"You can see it."

"Yes."

"Nobody's ever been able to see it." She sits down in the chair by the window, out of habit, and then looks annoyed with herself for doing it. "Go ahead and say it."

"I think I can take it off you."

Della gasps but then is quiet. Out in the yard a jay is losing an argument with something.

"Did it hurt?" I ask. "When he did it."

"No." She smooths her skirt over her knees. "That's the part nobody believes. It didn't hurt at all. I woke up loving him but empty somehow too."

Gage is standing against the door frame with his arms folded and his eyes somewhere on the floor, and he has been listening to this story his whole life and has never once been in the room for it.

"He's been dead seven years," Della says, "and I still set the cup out. I've thought about pouring it in the sink about four thousand times and I've never gotten to the tap. It's just so weird. I can't get myself to drink my coffee or pour them both out. "

"Then let me help."

"And after?" Her chin comes up, and there he is, right there in her face. "Forty years I've been like this. If you remove it, what happens?"

"I don't know," I tell her. "Nobody can tell you that. That's kind of the whole thing."

She looks at her son for a long second.

"Well," she says. "Get on with it, then."

I put two fingers on the line.

It's exactly like Mercy said it would be. Not cutting. You find where the knot's pulled the wrong way, and you take the tension off the wrong end, and you tell it that it's done.

Something goes through the kitchen like a struck bell, white, low along the floorboards and up the walls and out. The jay quits. Della's hand comes up to her chest, and the gray line goes soft as a cut string and slides out the window like a spool letting go, and there isn't anything left of it at all.

Della sits there with her hand flat over her collarbone.

Then she reaches over and picks up her cup off the sill and drinks the whole cold thing down in four swallows.

"Oh. That's disgusting," she says.

And then she's laughing, with tears coming down both sides of her face, and Gage crosses that kitchen faster than I've ever seen him move.

He goes down on one knee beside her chair like a man who doesn't know he's doing it.

Della takes his face in both hands.

"Oh, my boy. There you are," she says.

She walks us out to the truck. It's cold and the sky is scrubbed clean the way it gets in November, and the whole yard smells like wet leaves and woodsmoke.

Gage goes ahead to open my door, because he can't help it, and Della catches my sleeve.

"He won't ask you," she says, low. "Not ever. He'd rather go without."

"I know."

"No, honey, you don't." Her fingers tighten. "I watched a man take it. I've never once watched a man be given it. Neither has he." She lets go and pats my arm like she's handed me a casserole. Then she pulls me into a hug.