The coffee was cold. It had been cold for an hour. Kate sat in the driver's seat of the old Ford, watching the town through the windshield, watching the streetlights flicker on one by one as the December dark came down over the rust belt like a blanket you can't shake off.

She was twenty-eight. She had worked at Jim's Diner for eight years, pouring coffee and taking orders and pretending to care about the weather and the football and the price of gas, which was all anyone talked about anymore. The wedding was supposed to be next Saturday. Brett was supposed to be standing at the altar, which in this town meant standing at the front of the Methodist church while the organist played something that sounded like a elevator music version of a wedding march.

Brett worked at the factory that had closed six months ago. Before that, he had worked there for twelve years. Before that, he had been in high school, which was where they met, except they hadn't really met in high school. They had just existed in the same space, two people who sat at opposite ends of the cafeteria and never spoke to each other. They had met for real eight months ago, at the diner, when they both ordered black coffee at the same time and looked up at the same moment and smiled because it was the first interesting thing that had happened to either of them in a long time.

Kate had found the photograph in Brett's garage, in a box of old things he kept under the workbench. It was a photograph of two babies in a hospital bassinet, side by side, wrapped in white blankets. There was a piece of paper underneath it, typed on paper that had gone yellow with age. The paper had names on it. Kate's name. Brett's name. And a third name, the name of the woman who had placed them in the foster care system twenty-eight years ago.

She sat in the garage and read the paper three times. Three times she understood. Three times the understanding got heavier, like a stone dropping into her stomach and sinking.

They were not cousins. They were not distant relatives. They were brother and sister. Placed in different foster homes during the system's expansion in the seventies, separated as infants, brought together by the random geometry of a town that had nothing left to give except the people it had already discarded.

She did not scream. She did not cry. She sat in the garage and watched the dust motes float in the light from the single bulb overhead and thought about the factory that had closed and the town that was closing with it and the way everything in this place died slowly, one piece at a time, until there was nothing left but the shell of what used to be something.

She got into the Ford. She turned the key. The engine started with a sound like a cough. She drove to the empty lot behind the diner, the one where everyone went to think when they didn't want to go home. She parked. She turned off the engine. She opened the window.

She did not think about Brett. She thought about the cold coffee on the diner counter, about the customers who would come in tomorrow morning and order the same thing they ordered every day and never notice that something was missing, because in this town nothing was ever noticed until it was too late.

She closed the window. She started the engine again. She let it run.

The carbon monoxide does not announce itself. It does not have a sound or a smell or a colour. It is invisible and silent and it moves through your bloodstream like a quiet thief, stealing your awareness one breath at a time until you are not aware anymore and then you are not.

Kate did not feel it happen. She sat in the Ford with her hands on the steering wheel and her eyes on the dark lot and her mind on the cold coffee and the closed factory and the photograph of two babies in a hospital bassinet, and she thought about how everything in this town died the same way: slowly, quietly, and alone.

Frank found her in the morning. He was Brett's father, a retired factory worker who lived across the street and had noticed that the Ford had been sitting in the lot overnight and had decided to go over and knock on the window and find that the window was fogged from the inside and the engine was still running and his daughter-in-law-to-be was slumped over the steering wheel and not breathing.

He called the police. The police called the medical examiner. The medical examiner came and looked at Kate Miller and wrote something on a clipboard and said she was gone.

Brett was at the scrap yard when they called him. He was sorting metal, separating the useful from the useless, the salvageable from the trash. He listened to the police officer speak. He said oh. He said it in the same voice he would have used if the officer had told him the price of copper had gone down again.

Then he went back to sorting metal.

The local paper ran a two-paragraph story in the business section, right between an ad for a used Ford and an ad for a job at the remaining open factory, which was the one that made plastic things that nobody needed but somebody bought anyway. The story said: Local man and woman found dead in automobile. Authorities rule the deaths accidental. No further comment.

That was it. Two paragraphs. No investigation. No drama. No one cared.

Kate and Brett were buried in the same cemetery, which was not planned but happened because the cemetery only had one plot left and the funeral home put them together because it was cheaper. Frank attended both funerals. He sat in the front row and did not cry. He went back to his house and sat in his armchair and watched the news and went to bed early.

The diner stayed open. Jim poured the coffee. The customers came in and ordered and talked about the weather and the football and the price of gas, and no one mentioned Kate or Brett, because in this town nothing was ever mentioned until it was convenient to mention it, and it was never convenient.

The coffee was cold. It stayed cold. No one came to warm it up.