The first hour was practical.

  That was how Zelig got through it. He made it practical because practical had steps and steps had sequence and sequence meant you did not have to think about what you were actually doing, just what came next.

  He and Flint moved Ervan off the Row.

  Not far. The building two streets over where the Hollow Hand kept a secondary room for situations that required somewhere to be that was not the main meeting place. They did not speak while they did it. There was nothing to say that was not going to be wrong and they both understood this and chose silence over wrongness.

  Reva arrived twenty minutes later.

  Zelig did not know how she knew. He had not sent word. She came through the door and looked at Ervan and looked at Zelig and looked at Flint and her face did something brief and controlled and then it was done and she was practical too, which was how Reva had always been, practicality being the form her particular kind of care took.

  She looked at the room.

  “The men Stillson brought.” She said.

  “Gone.” Zelig said. “Before it ended.”

  “Stillson.”

  “Gone.” Zelig said. A different kind of gone. Reva read this in his face and nodded once.

  “Anyone see.” She said.

  “The whole Row.” Flint said.

  Reva processed this. “The Row sees everything and says nothing. That’s always been true.” She looked at Zelig. “Are you hurt.”

  “No.”

  She looked at him in the specific way of someone checking whether the answer was true. She decided it was true enough.

  “Sit down.” She said.

  He sat down.

  Aldo came an hour after Reva. Then the other crew member, a quiet man named Petch who had been with Ervan longer than anyone, who came in and looked at the room and sat down in the corner and did not say a word for the rest of the afternoon.

  Nobody said the right thing because there was no right thing.

  Reva made a list of what needed doing. She read it aloud to the room not because she needed help with it but because having something read aloud gave people somewhere to put their attention. Zelig listened to the list and noted three items that required his specific input and gave that input when asked and said nothing the rest of the time.

  Flint sat beside him.

  Not close enough to be performing comfort. Just beside him. The specific proximity of someone who had decided that being present was what the situation required and was not going to move until the situation changed.

  Zelig did not tell him to move.

  The afternoon went.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  At some point Marie arrived.

  He did not know how she had found out either. The Underlayers talked to itself the way it always had and the Row had seen everything and the Row talked and Marie knew people on the Row who talked to her and so she was there, standing in the doorway of the secondary room with her coat still on and her eyes going immediately to Zelig.

  He looked at her.

  She crossed the room and sat down beside him and put her hand over his on the table and left it there.

  She did not say anything.

  He did not say anything.

  Her hand on his was warm and specific and present and he looked at it for a moment and then looked at the wall and sat there with it and felt the thing he had not let himself feel since the Row begin to move somewhere underneath everything, slow and deep, the way water moves under ice.

  He did not let it come up yet.

  Not yet.

  Evening.

  The crew thinned out slowly, not all at once, the way people leave when nobody wants to be the first to go but everyone eventually goes. Aldo first, his size making the room feel smaller when he was distressed rather than larger. Then Petch, who stood up from his corner after hours of silence and put his hand briefly on the table near Ervan, not on him, near him, and left without a word.

  Reva stayed until the practical things were handled and then looked at Zelig.

  “Tomorrow.” She said.

  “Tomorrow.” He said.

  She left.

  Flint looked at Zelig. Then at Marie.

  “I’ll be outside.” He said, and went into the hallway and closed the door.

  Marie looked at her brother.

  He was looking at Ervan.

  He had been looking at Ervan on and off all day in the way you look at something you are trying to understand through the looking, as if enough sustained attention would eventually produce an explanation that the situation itself had failed to provide.

  “He came because of you.” Marie said. Not an accusation. Just a fact she was putting on the table.

  “Yes.” Zelig said.

  “He knew what he was walking into.”

  “He always knew what he was walking into.” Zelig said. “That was.” He stopped.

  Marie waited.

  “That was who he was.” Zelig said. “He decided what he was for a long time ago. He walked onto the Row because that was what being decided looked like.”

  Marie looked at him.

  “You loved him.” She said. Simply, without dressing it up.

  Zelig looked at Ervan’s face.

  He thought about the handshake the first night. The way he had sat in the dark afterward thinking about it. The months of watching Ervan run the crew and finding in it a model for something he had not had a name for and had been building toward without knowing. The way Ervan said good and meant more than one thing by it.

  “I didn’t know that I did.” He said. “Until today.”

  Marie’s hand found his again on the table.

  He let the thing under the ice move.

  It was not clean. It did not come up the way things came up in texts when characters experienced grief, all at once and fully formed. It came up the way it actually came up, in pieces, inconsistent, some of it arriving and the rest staying down, and what arrived was not tears or sound or any of the visible expressions of it but a pressure behind his sternum that was new and enormous and which he understood was going to be there for a long time.

  He sat with it.

  Marie sat with him.

  Outside in the hallway Flint sat against the wall in the dark and waited, because that was what you did when two people needed a room.

  Later, much later, when the building was quiet and Ervan had been seen to properly and the room was just a room again, Zelig and Flint walked back toward the Underlayers through streets that were empty at this hour.

  They walked for a long time without talking.

  “He was the first person I respected.” Zelig said eventually. “Without calculating whether respecting him was useful.”

  Flint walked beside him.

  “I know.” Flint said.

  “I didn’t know that was possible.” Zelig said. “Before him.”

  Flint was quiet for a moment.

  “It’s possible.” He said. “It’s just rare.”

  They walked the rest of the way in silence and at Arbor Street they stopped and Flint looked at Zelig with the expression that had all the layers stripped back, the same expression from the Row, the simple one underneath everything else.

  “Get some sleep.” He said.

  “You too.” Zelig said.

  Flint turned and walked off down the street and Zelig watched him go and thought about what Flint was walking toward, wherever he slept, whatever he was building toward in the private interior of his own ambition, the tycoon path that was just beginning to show its shape.

  He went upstairs.

  Marie was already home, already asleep.

  He sat at the table in the dark for a while.

  He thought about Ervan.

  He thought about the crack in the framework.

  He thought about what grew in cracks if you let it.

  He did not have an answer yet.

  He went to bed.