Frannie must have hung up, because she was now standing in the portal that separated their dining and living rooms. “Diz?”

He turned his head toward her, perhaps surprised to see her there, appearing out of thin air the way she had. “Hey.”

She crossed the remaining few steps to him and sat on the ottoman at his feet. “You’ve been just sitting there without moving a muscle since I’ve been in this doorway.”

“Isometric exercise. Every muscle tensed for maximum effect.” But there was no humor in it.

“Are you all right?”

He shrugged, his effort to smile halfhearted at best. “How’s Vinnie?”

“Good. He got a B-plus on his first poly-sci exam.”

“Slacker.”

“He wanted to know if we needed him to come up. He said he would. I told him I didn’t think so.”

“Probably right. Nothing for him to do.”

“You either,” Frannie said. “Just be there for them if they need us.”

Sighing, Hardy shook his head. “You think this stuff is buried so deep down, and next thing you know you’re blindsided by it.”

Frannie hesitated, but she knew what he was talking about. “Michael?”

Hardy’s firstborn son had died in infancy thirty-five years before. A precocious seven-month-old, he’d stood up in his crib well before he was supposed to be able to and had pitched over the guardrail that they’d kept at half-mast. He had landed on his head.

“I don’t think I’ve consciously thought about him in five years, and now here he is, big as life. Bigger than he was in life.”

Frannie rested a hand on his knee. “This may not turn out the same. Let’s hope.”

“I don’t know if Abe could take it, how anybody does. I don’t know how I did.”

Frannie knew. Hardy’s son’s tragedy had marked the end of his first marriage and the abandonment of his law career. It had led to ten years behind the bar at the Little Shamrock, where he had averaged somewhere between one and two dozen beers a day, not to mention the rest of the alcoholic intake.