That night, Ruth couldn’t sleep. She lay awake listening to the wind and turning the question over and over.
Who was this man? And why did he seem to know her?
She was still thinking about it the next morning when she went down the basement stairs to fetch a jar of preserves.
It happened in a second. Her slipper caught the edge of the fourth step. Her hand slid off the rail.
And then she was lying on the cold concrete floor, and her hip was on fire, and she could not get up.
“Help,” she whispered. Then louder. “Help!”
But there was no one to hear. Biscuit peered down at her from the top of the stairs and meowed.
Her phone was upstairs on the kitchen table, beside her cooling cup of peppermint tea.
Ruth tried to drag herself toward the stairs. The pain made the room spin. She stopped, gasping, and laid her cheek against the floor.
The hours crawled by. The little basement window went from bright to grey. She grew so cold that she stopped shivering, and some distant part of her knew that was not a good sign.
She thought of Walter. She thought of Michael as a little boy, with his gap-toothed grin. She thought she might never see the spring.
And then, far above her, she heard a sound.
Someone was pounding on her front door.
“Mrs. Callahan? Ruth!”
It was Daniel’s voice. And he sounded frightened.