Chapter 2: Danny's Sneakers

She was out the door by six-fifteen.

Her mother had not moved. The television threw white noise at the ceiling and her mother's mouth was open and she was breathing with the steady, reliable rhythm of someone who had given the night nothing to work with, which was its own kind of talent. Mara left a note on the kitchen table — out early, back for lunch — and wrote it in the specific shorthand her mother had long since stopped questioning, the words calibrated to communicate presence without inviting response.

The morning was already thick. July heat in Indiana didn't build toward noon the way it was supposed to; it simply arrived sometime around midnight and had the audacity to still be there at dawn, sitting in the air like something that had never left and never intended to. The concrete of the front walk was warm through the soles of Mara's sneakers. The birdsong had come up loud — jays and sparrows going about their ordinary noisy business, entirely indifferent to what she was carrying in her chest — and somewhere on the next block a sprinkler was running, ticking through its arc with the patient idiocy of machinery, and all of it was so relentlessly normal that Mara felt the wrongness of the night before not as contrast but as contamination. The normal things were normal in the wrong way. The way a room looks normal right after something bad has happened in it, before you know to look.