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night.” She reached for the check and removed her credit card from her wallet. “Someone had to talk.”
    She signed the receipt. They sat amid frost.
    The silent anger that had overtaken her son was too similar to the impenetrable silence that had captured her own husband in the years before his death. Until Stephen’s first week at Cannon, Monica had been convinced that Jeremy had not bequeathed his darkness. And that seemed just. Jeremy had forfeited part-ownership of Stephen when he took his own life, leaving his widow to battle any lingering traces of the man who abandoned them both.
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    A Density of Souls
    She had been taunting Stephen, boring him deliberately, trying to lure him out of his shell.
    “It’s late,” Stephen murmured.
    He lifted his eyes to hers. She was startled by something she saw there.
    Pain. In one week, Stephen had developed a type of penetrating gaze that comes out of a fine silt of resignation that settles upon the soul. It was a gaze so rare in young men of his age that its absence usually made them what they were.
    He held her gaze.
    “I love you, Stephen.” She was surprised by how easily the words came out of her mouth. “There will be times when you don’t think that means a lot. Or when you take it for granted. Or when it’s not as important to you as approval from . . . other people. But trust me, you need it. And you’re going to need it later, so . . .”
    Monica nervously looked to her hands folded across her lap and then lifted her gaze to see Stephen raise one clenched fist to his right eye, before the tears could trickle down his cheek.
    “It’s important for you to know that I love you,” she finished.
    He nodded, suddenly, as if to shake her words from his ears. He lowered his fist. Tears sprang from his eyes despite the fact that he had shut them. He continued to nod his head dumbly. Monica rose, moved to his side of the booth, slid an arm around his shoulders, and walked him out of the restaurant, meeting the curious glances with the hostile glare she had perfected as a child.
    They drove home in silence. Monica repeated one thought in her head, almost whispering it aloud: Goddamn you, Jeremy.
    On the third floor of the Conlin residence, Jeremy Conlin’s study remained just as it was the day he had shot himself.
    A child of the Garden District, he had courted Monica with poetry.
    She often came up the stairs to visit his study late at night when Stephen was asleep one floor below. The streetlight through the single window threw spiderweb shadows of oak branches across walls plastered with quotations—drawn from both his own writing and that of his idols, Theodore Roethke and Thomas Mann. He had published one book of poems, The Upstairs Stories, which had met with miserable reviews but had secured him tenure in the Creative Writing department at Tulane University. Monica kept a copy of the book on The Falling Impossible
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    Jeremy’s desk. It was the only thing she ever touched in the room.
    As Stephen slept, she flipped through its pages. She knew the poems by heart. Anger kept her from ferreting out Jeremy’s wisdom, from de-coding it from the lines of his poems. Yet she never became so angry that she could clear out his study, pack the notebooks into boxes, and paint the walls. After several hours sitting silently there, Monica would relax. She knew she was communing with Jeremy’s ghost. He did not haunt their house as an apparition. Rather, Jeremy Conlin was a constant, silent presence on the third floor, his substance the papers and shelves and a desk with a typewriter. If he had a wisdom to impart, it would have to filter from the study to where she and Stephen made their lives downstairs.
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    “W ho read last night?”
    Yale-educated David Carter knew enough not to let a single freshman English class compromise the reputation he had built with his students over four years. By November, however, a week before Thanksgiving, David realized that an