In her bed, Rorie laid staring at the ceiling. She listened to the wind nudging her bedroom window; to the slow rattle and rev and tire-whisper of cars moving down the street; to the quiet steady ticking of the clock hanging on her wall; to the creaking and popping of the house’s old pipes; to the quiet murmur of cable news filtering up from where her mother sat watching in the living room.

The collage of small sounds was ordinary and terrifying. Sleep came very slowly.

On his couch, in his small house, with his feet up on the coffee table and crossed at the ankles betwee Roscoe’s bowl and an empty bottle of wine, Tom McEllroy dozed. A yearbook lay open on his lap, several more sitting beside him in a stack on the couch cushion.

In an all-night franchise diner, in a corner booth by herself, Nyx smoked and drank burnt black coffee and read Dostoevsky. The book was a weathered paperback edition of The Brothers Karamazov on loan from the library, where she’d spent a big chunk of her day. Her hand crept up to her right cheek now and then, poking gently around the bruised flesh on that side of her face. Nothing broken, she’d decided. Cheekbone intact. Teeth a little sore but not loose. The inside of her cheek had been mashed against her teeth hard enough to cut it in a couple of spots, but there was no real damage. Just aesthetics–looks from people all day, on the street downtown, in the library, from the dead-eyed waitress who’d been slow refilling her coffee all night.

Around two o’clock, the drunks had started filtering in in force, immigrating on the wings of last calls and you can’t stay heres and driven by hunger or boredom or the simple abstract to desire to not let the night end. They crowded noisily into booths, flanking Nyx in her quiet solitude. In her head, she thanked them: obnoxious business to distract the otherwise idle waitstaff from the girl with the bruise who wouldn’t leave. She listened for a while to their conversations, the loud laughing retellings of the night and the recitals of old stories and dirty jokes, and then went back to Alyosha’s troubles.