His shoulders were hunched up because of the crutches. She leaned her head against one of them. He tilted his cheek against her hair.

Morris’s abdominal injury was healing well, but his right hand was a wreck. He couldn’t hold anything. He couldn’t even hold a book.

“Are you bored? Is there anything I can do?” Nick asked.

Morris said no.

Nick hovered there. His left leg, still fragile, was bent at the knee and swinging just over the floor.

“I’m so grateful,” Nick finally said. “We all are. I know what you did for Alexandra.”

Morris’s voice was flat. “Really? What did I do?”

Nick beamed. “Alexandra had the fireplace urn. You pulled Liv around, away from her. That’s how you got hurt. I’m so sorry you got hurt. But we’re so grateful. Alexandra doesn’t understand. She thought you did it to protect Liv. She’s angry to have been stopped. She’s just a kid. I had to explain it to her.”

“Why don’t you explain it to me,” he said, all in one tone.

“You protected Alexandra, not just Liv. Killing someone, even in self-defense or defending someone else… that’s something a person has to carry around. It would have changed her. It would have… it would have been a burden for all of her life. You protected her. Thank you. Thank you for that.”

Morris breathed deep through his nose. He didn’t blink.

“Hi, Daddy!” A teenager bounded in, fresh from class. She was around the same age as Alexandra, but in the clothing of a different school. She dumped her backpack and kissed Morris’s cheek, then promised to come right back. She headed for the toilets.

“You know what’s the worst thing about being a dad?” Morris leaned forward. He wrapped his good hand around Nick’s crutch, and pulled himself up close to Nick’s face. “The kid is this thing you have to protect. She’s so much more important than anything else. Even if you have to die, to keep her safe, you do it. You just do it, because if it comes down to you or her, it’s her. That’s it. It’s just her. But here’s the thing: Between me and the rest of the world, it’s me. It’s me, for her sake, because I’m her father. She needs me. She needs to not lose her dad to some nutter with a knife. What was I thinking? What the hell had I been thinking?”

He let go of the crutch. Nick rocked back.

Peter was sitting on Nick’s hospital bed, arms crossed. “I thought you couldn’t walk,” he accused. “I was told you’d never walk again and it would make you even more pathetic and everyone would point and laugh at you for as long as you lived.”

“I hobble,” Nick said. He forced a smile. Peter didn’t. “It’s good to see you,” Nick said, trying to haul the conversation back to a proper start.

Peter resisted. “Do the nurses usually let you wander? Is that wise?”

“I can balance all right,” Nick answered, as if the question had to do with his leg and not with his recent running away to Dovecote. “I was visiting the Inspector. I had to talk to him. Did you know that he’s Richard’s brother? I could hardly believe it when my mother told me that. He’s the one who caught Liv. He-”

“We all got to know him, Nick. We were all questioned by him. About you.”

“Yes, of course.” Nick still waited in the doorway, on one foot.

Peter stood up and to the side, to give him back his bed. Nick sat on it, legs over the side and back straight, rather than lying back down.

“Did you know that they dredged the Cam for you?” Peter demanded.

Nick nodded.

“That Richard considered postponing the wedding? Did you know that Polly’s mother was arrested?”

“What?”

“Because of you.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“A lot happened while you were off.”

“Is she all right?”

“She was only in a few days.”

“Days? My God. Polly didn’t say.”

Peter lifted his head. “She was here?”

“Half an hour ago.”

Peter sucked in a breath, then whooshed it out. “I’ve got to ask you this. But… you’ve got to tell me the truth.”

“About what?” There was so much he had to tell everyone, over and over again. Why he left, where he went, what he’d hoped to find and what he did find…

Peter leaned in close and spoke barely above a whisper. “Liv said you raped her.”

“What?” Nick gaped. “What?”

“After they dredged the Cam she was upset. We all were. All day we’d prepared for the worst news. It didn’t come, thank God it didn’t, but all that coiled energy had nowhere to spring. Then she told me, and I was angry, and I didn’t believe her. But it stuck in my head. It stuck there.”

“You didn’t believe her,” Nick repeated, insistent.

“Not at first. No. Then maybe… The idea was absurd, but everything was already absurd. There was no reason for you to have run away, no reason for anyone to have hurt you. There was no ransom demand, no body… And I remembered the last time I saw you. You were upset about Liv and Polly. It came across like something on the scale of a pregnancy scare. But this was you, Nick, so at the time I thought you’d ‘led Liv on’ as far as a kiss, or maybe not even that. Maybe just words had been taken the wrong way. I hadn’t thought anything significant of it.

“Then Liv told me you’d raped her. Having done that would make you run away. Or make Liv want to hurt you. It could even have made you hurt yourself. It was unthinkable that you would do it in the first place, but, if you had done it, that would make sense of everything else. Not just of you being gone, but now. What Liv did. Not why it was aimed at Gretchen and Harry, but why she felt she had to hit back at somebody…”

“No!”

“No what, Nick?”

“No to everything! No, I didn’t rape her!”

“That’s the truth?”

A leaf hanging from one of the carnation stems suddenly dropped. It sawed back and forth through the air on its slow fall, finally brushing gently against the cold floor. The slight sound of that soft friction magnified and elongated to fill the gap between asking the question and hearing the answer.

“I wouldn’t do a thing like that,” Nick said.

Peter goggled.

“You wouldn’t? Really? We all said that. ‘Nick wouldn’t do that.’ Nick wouldn’t just leave. That’s what we told the police, over and over again. But that’s exactly what you did do, so how the hell do I know what you would or wouldn’t do anymore?”

Peter avoided the bus. He wanted to keep moving.

He believed Nick. He was relieved. But he was still rattled by having had to ask him.

Nick was home, but home had changed while he was gone. Home had changed partly because he’d been gone. His absence had been a hole they all kept falling into. Now that he was back, he didn’t quite fit that space anymore. Now the people who cared for him most were poked by his sharp edges, and poked back with their own.

The south end of Cambridge, around the hospital, isn’t the Cambridge that Polly and Liv swooned over. It’s just ordinary brick houses, and then, after a good distance, Hills Road erupts with practical, un-decorative shops and businesses. Only much farther beyond do the colleges and parks and expensive stores by which Americans mean “ Cambridge ” cluster.

It used to be a fashionable prank for students to scale the University’s towers. There’s a famous leap from a student bedroom onto the Senate House roof, which has been forbidden for years. Peter had never been tempted. He’d never felt the urge to climb.

Until now.

He turned into Downing Street. He’d be caught, surely. But the question was, how far could he get before that happened?

Someone had had the bright idea to string the tower cranes building the Grand Arcade with Christmas lights; that’s how much a fixture the cranes had become. They shone.

That’s one of the last things Liv said to Peter: that she loved the cranes. That they were more beautiful, in their immensity, symmetry, and balance, than whatever they could build.

There’s nothing so tall as they in Cambridge. Yes, there’s the view from Great St. Mary’s bell tower, but it has a cage around the top to prevent jumping. You can press your face up against the cross-hatching to give your eye an unjailed look. You can see down onto the college lawns, and notice the plaids and stripes made by the mowers. But the cranes…