It has been a warm June, and a sweltering July, but by mid-month the heatwave is extinguished in several torrential downpours that make the dust and trash choked gullies overflow.

One undesired side effect of the weather uncertainty is that Brad’s weekend plans keep changing. Kyle and Jay, Maria and Peter’s twin boys, turn five, and the party morphs from an elaborate fun-for-adults-and-kids outdoor affair at a new venue in the Botanical Gardens on Saturday afternoon to a house-with-backyard-BBQ option on Sunday, since the only catering company Maria can bully into agreement on short notice is booked for the Saturday.

“They’re driving me insane,” she assures Brad on Thursday when he calls her at lunchtime to see how she’s holding up. “I’ve ordered a dozen lamb cutlets, thirty burger patties and twenty German sausages for the grill, but the yard is a mud field. The chef refuses to come out under ‘such appalling conditions’—his words. I guess, if it’s raining again, Peter and his guy friends can cook the meat on the patio under a tarp, and then we eat indoors.” She sighs. “You have no idea what it feels like, dealing with a bunch of crazy people.”

Brad tries not to feel the sting of that. She’s stressed, and it was a throwaway comment, but his mind returns to what it was like to live with Aiden and his tenuous hold on sanity. He reminds himself that Maria knows very little about how unwell Aiden really was.

The night before the twins’ party, Brad receives a strange phone call. He’s at home, cooking pasta arrabiata, when his cell buzzes on the kitchen counter. The number on the display is unfamiliar, but since it’s local Brad picks up. It might be work-related.

“Yes?” he says, clamping the phone to his ear with one shoulder and pulling the pasta pot off the flame as it starts to froth.

There’s silence on the other end. Brad puts the pot down and transfers the phone to the other ear. “Hello?”

He hears someone breathing for a few seconds, but before he can get irritated enough to think of something else to say, the line goes dead.

Brad holds the phone for a moment, thinking. Then he chucks it back onto the counter, a little harder than planned. He drains the spaghetti and finishes off the sauce without paying much attention. He’s no longer very hungry.

It was probably just someone misdialing a number. Brad hates that he gets rattled by a misdialed call. Pre-Aiden, something like this wouldn’t have fazed him, and it’s bad for his professional peace of mind.

But he can’t shake the memory of how Aiden used to call him at work when he had an especially bad day, and how he would just sit there for minutes at a time, not saying a word. Sometimes Brad would talk to him, and sometimes he just put the phone on the desk by his computer, or on the dashboard of the unmarked car, so Aiden could hear some of the chatter from the incidence room or the noise of the road. That always seemed to soothe him.

But why would Aiden call him now, after all this time? He’s made it very clear that he doesn’t want to see Brad again. Maybe he’s changed his mind. Maybe he’s in trouble. That thought chases an icy feeling through Brad’s gut. He gives the phone a long look, and even touches it with the tip of his finger. The number showed up on the display. He could call back. But he’s sworn to himself that he’ll no longer cater to the madness that possesses Aiden and transforms him into that ungrateful stranger Brad doesn’t recognize. It only ever made things worse for both of them when they were still together. Now, trying to help Aiden would put them both in an impossible situation.

Brad dumps some pasta on a plate and splashes sauce on top. Then he takes the food and a bottle of beer over to the sofa. His standards are slipping, but at least he can plonk himself down in front of a Barbra Streisand movie he seems to have seen before and forget about the phone call, and Aiden, for a short time.

But when the movie is done, and the pasta has disappeared, Brad makes a beeline for the phone. He snaps it up and hits the Return Call button before he can think about what he’s doing. It rings and rings, but nobody picks up.

Finally, Brad lowers the phone. Without looking at the number again he clears the call history and turns the phone off. He leaves it on the table by the coat rack and ascends the stairs to bed one at a time, even though it’s not even nine p.m. yet.

He sleeps badly that night and wakes a few times to nightmarish images he thought he’d long forgotten of reddish puddles on bathroom tiles.