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Published in the May 2013 issue

EARLIER: "The Survivor," the 2011 story of Bill Petit

A THURSDAY

"You never saw these," Bill Petit says as he opens his front door. It's ten o'clock in the morning and he is holding a stack of broken-down cardboard boxes he was supposed to take out to the trash. They missed the recycling last week. They're still getting used to the schedule. He and his wife, Christine, moved into this house a month ago, not long after the wedding, and she's trying to make it nice, to give it "the feminine touch," as Bill says. And that means not having boxes stacked by the front door. He steps out past the pumpkin left over from Halloween and half eaten by squirrels, and gets rid of them before she sees.

His hair is damp from the shower, combed back. His beard is trimmed neat. He wears a checked shirt and jeans. He is a newlywed, for the first time in a long time, and a new homeowner, so his days are full of little interactions with his wife and with his house, the little interactions that make up a life. Since the murders, it's these moments that little by little have brought Petit back to life. Back inside, he fiddles with the sliding doors that lead out to the deck. "These sliders don't sit right," he says. "They're not flush." Have to fix that. He jiggles the door shut. The house is a baby-blue prefab sitting on steel beams and concrete footings at the end of a residential street along the Farmington River in western Connecticut. Off to one side is a copse of maple trees along the river's edge, some of them felled by the beavers who gnaw the trunks until the trees topple and land with a deep thud on the bed of brown leaves below. On the other side of the house, right outside the front door, is a pumping station about the size of a tennis court, with a chain-link fence around it — the town recently put in a sewer system, and a pumping station ended up here in the Petits' new front yard. The room in the house that's supposed to be the master bedroom faces the pumping station. Bill and Christine instead squeezed their bed into the small room across the hall, which is not much larger than the bed itself, but it faces the river. That's the side of the house they choose to focus on. That's the view they want, the peace they want.

"We painted this, the inside," Petit says, nodding to the white walls of the living room. "This was all dark. All dark. Then she put these funky lights in. Put a new floor in, got rid of some furniture, tried to fit in here. No basement, no attic, no garage, no storage. What you see is what you get."

One of the funky lights is a chandelier that looks like a giant fluffy white dandelion. That's pure Christine. And the benches out on the deck, which the previous owner left behind — she had Bill paint those bright purple.

Christine Paluf Petit sings out as she enters the room, "Shangri-la!" She waves her hands around like a hostess on a game show. Then she lowers her voice a notch — still several notches, and a couple of octaves, above Bill's dry New England monotone — and, extending her damp right hand, says of their home, "We like it. It's fun. I just washed my hands. Nice to meet you."

She whirls around the room, putting water on for tea, straightening a blanket on the arm of a chair, sliding an ottoman over in front of Bill so he can put his feet up. "It's peaceful here, you know? It's hard to find that," she says, clanging out mugs and spoons on the counter. "The town here is an artsy kind of place, and there's something about those places that — the mind-set is to create new things, you know? Like this lamp. That's the whimsy! Look at the shadows it makes. This is the jewelry, I call it. I'm trying to draw your eye awaaay from the bad walls, the bad windows." She flicks her hands at the chandelier and says, "You're not gonna look at that because this is here!"

She smiles and her eyes drift out the window toward the river. She runs a hand through her beach-blond hair.

"I'll open this door a little," she says to no one. "It's a nice day."

Bill's eyes follow her, and he grins a little as she buzzes around. "But the house is so small, so it's hard," she says, going on the way she sometimes does, filling the silence. "Literally, literally, you can't walk around the bed in the room we made into our bedroom. But you can see the water! So of course we did it that way. Why would I want to look at that fence?"

"Whose idea was that?" Bill asks.

Christine gives him a glare and a smile.

"Just checking," he says.

She's back in the kitchen now, fixing the tea.

Petit absently picks up his phone from a side table. His hand brushes a stack of brochures that say "Michaela's Garden." On the front cover is an emblem depicting a mother bird wrapping two baby birds in her wing, and the birds form the shape of a heart. Inside each brochure is a small packet of flower seeds. The flowers are called four-o'clocks, because their blooms open up in the late afternoon each day and blossom all night before their petals fold in again with the first rays of dawn light. Bill's daughter Michaela loved four-o'clocks — they're showy flowers, red and white and pink and yellow, trumpet-shaped, bushy. She and Bill used to like to plant them around the yard when they lived a couple towns over in Cheshire, the two of them out there on their knees in the dirt. Bill liked them because they were easy to plant — pop the seed in the soil about a quarter-inch down, cover it up, boom. Done.

After the murders, he started the Petit Family Foundation in memory of the girls and his wife Jennifer, who was forty-eight when one of the intruders raped her on their living-room floor, and then strangled her with his hands before soaking her body with gasoline. Hayley was seventeen — she almost escaped, having been tied to her bed for hours with nylons and rope, a pillowcase over her head. Michaela was only eleven, and died in her bed after the younger of the two men sodomized her, then poured gas all over her room just before the fire started.

The seeds in the small packet inside the brochures were harvested from the very plants she and Bill planted. The house was torn down — the fire burned so fast and so hot that the structure was beyond salvation. But before it was, Petit's brother-in-law and a few others went over and dug up as many four-o'clocks as they could and replanted them far from that place. Now the seeds are harvested — something like three hundred thousand so far — and sold in little packets inside the brochures for ten dollars, for the foundation.

Petit pokes his phone with his thumb. "Too many e-mails," he says without looking up. Foundation business, invitations to appear as an honored guest at this function or that, junk mail. "I try to look at the ten worst ones and get rid of them. There's Williams and Sonomas. Somehow Williams and Sonomas — we got a couple of wedding gifts and somehow now they have us on their list for the rest of our lives."

He keeps scrolling.

"That thing at Children's Hospital is next Tuesday at 3:15," he calls over to Christine. "Tuesday the eleventh. Meet 'em in the lobby."

She looks up. "What thing?"

"That lady, Wilma Hoffman, from Bulkeley High School who does the knitting club. They knit stuff for the kids. We gave 'em a grant, and we're gonna go with them to Children's Hospital."

Christine pulls out her phone. This is what they have to do constantly. Sync.

"The thirteenth?"

"Eleventh. Tuesday the eleventh. Three-fifteen."

"Okay. Children's Hospital. Which one?"

"The one in Hartford," Bill says. He pauses before adding, "The only one."

Christine murmurs a little singsongy reminder: "I don't know that."

They put their coats on. There are the usual errands to do. Petit shoves the storm door closed as he leaves. A gust of wind caught it the other day and busted the bracket that keeps it latched, so you need to really push it to make sure it's shut. Have to fix that.

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You just keep going, he says. No, Christine says. She corrects him: You just keep going. You find a way to keep living. Not everyone would, or could. To which Bill scrunches his face into a look that says, If you say so.

12:15 P.M.

Lunch first. They'll walk into town, which they like to do. Petit can do things to relax these days. Or at least he can do the kinds of things other people do to relax. He can simulate leisure. At the end of Petit's driveway, an old railroad bridge creaks over the river. On the other side: an antiques barn, a package store, some gifty shops, a wine bar, a pub in the old depot, a place to rent kayaks. Cute town. There's this one sandwich place where everything's homemade. They do a turkey sandwich with cranberry sauce on pumpernickel that Bill gets almost every time. Bill and Christine sit and eat and talk and watch people. No one stares at him here.

Bill sometimes makes jokes that show his age, and Christine's — he's fifty-six, she's thirty-six. At the lunch counter, the girl hands Christine a bowl of steaming winter-squash soup. "Danger, Will Robinson," Bill says to his wife as she picks it up, quoting a television show that went off the air nine years before she was born. When she successfully carries it to the table without burning herself, he says, "Well done, Grasshopper."

Yeah, well, you gotta make some jokes.

You just keep going. That's the way Petit has lived since the morning of July 23, 2007, the first day in more than twenty-two years that he had neither a family nor a home, both of which were savagely taken from him the night before, just a few hours after he fell asleep. Two men broke in. Ripped his life from him in the most hideous way imaginable. And now he just keeps going. He doesn't talk about it much, his soldiering on or whatever people call it. His courage, his fortitude. It's just how he was brought up, he says. You do what you have to, he says. You just keep going, he says.

No, Christine says. She corrects him: You do what you have to. You just keep going. You find ways to keep living. Not everyone would, or could. To which Bill scrunches his face into a look that says, If you say so, his fingers absently gathering the fallen leaves from a dying plant into a neat pile on the table.

After that — after you keep going for a while — you yearn for the return of mundane normalcy, if such a thing is even possible. Your days, like anyone's days, become a mosaic of present and past, each piece as surprising as the next. But in your case, the past is a conflagration, the end of the world. So you go on, and the most important questions in your life, the ones you ask yourself every day and the ones people think but don't say out loud, become: Where, exactly, are you going? Will there ever come a time when you'll be able to salvage what is good and leave the horror behind?

How do you get out of bed in the morning?

Will you ever be able to sleep again?

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2:00 P.M.

He talks to the car radio.

"Sorry dudes. You're out," he says to the Rolling Stones after a couple of verses of "Midnight Rambler," looking at the dash as he punches the buttons. "Oh, crap. Okay, we got about four tenths of a gallon left. It says we got about ten miles left. Just about get us to Plainville."

"Oh don't do that," Christine says. "Get gas."

She knows how to poke him like that. He liked that in her from the time they met. It was in the Founders Room at the Farmington Country Club, where Bill plays golf with his best friend, Ron. If you dreamed up a room you'd want to hang out in after a round of golf, the Founders Room would be it. Everything is dark wood. At one end is a mammoth fireplace, at the other end, the bar, which is where they first started talking. She was the club's marketing director, and she also tended bar in the Founders Room. She didn't know who he was, which is to say that she didn't know he was "Dr. Bill Petit." She didn't know his family had been murdered. She wasn't living in Connecticut when it happened, and the news had passed her by. She just knew he was a member of the club, and she thought he was cute.

He would order a Diet Coke with three cherries. They talked. One of Christine's friends at the club noticed, but didn't say anything. Ron noticed. Ron's known him since Little League, when Bill was on the Owls and Ron was on the Seals. Known him through every crush, every girlfriend. Knew Jen, of course.

How about her? he'd say to Bill. The girl behind the bar.

Nothing happened. Eventually Christine went back to Boston, where she was studying photography at Boston University's Center for Digital Imaging Arts. For her final project, she had to volunteer her services to a nonprofit. She e-mailed Bill Petit, who, she now knew, had lost his family and had a foundation. Did they need any pictures?

He knew who she was, and he knew she was pretty, and he knew she could crack a joke. It took him about five seconds to say yes, Christine was welcome to photograph whatever she liked.

Petit scans the radio, nixing songs. "Nope... nope... nope." The road follows the curvature of the Farmington River, and he's on a stretch with no stoplights, speed limit fifty, cruising along. Thin horizontal white and gray clouds lash across the baby-blue midwinter sky.

"Nice blue," says Bill.

"Look at all the layers," says Christine.

They drive on for a minute without talking.

"Farmington tiramisu," Bill finally says.

Down Unionville Avenue, getting closer to Plainville, roads he could drive blindfolded. "My dad and my uncle Charlie used to run this package store here," he says. "And that's where I used to work when I was sixteen years old, that shop. Making sandwiches."

Christine mutters something about how he sure doesn't make sandwiches anymore.

"I got paid for it," he replies. "You pay me, I'll make you a sandwich."

"I'll keep washing your socks."

"I'll just buy new socks."

The relationship moved pretty fast. One of the men who invaded Petit's home and killed his wife and daughters went on trial in the fall of 2011, and Christine came with Bill to the courthouse. Petit and his parents and sister and aunts and uncles and friends would drive the fifty minutes from Plainville to New Haven each morning, not talking much on the way. They sat in the courtroom on the sixth floor of New Haven Superior Court, just a few feet from the man who saw Jen and Michaela at the supermarket one Sunday afternoon — the afternoon of July 22, 2007 — and followed them home, then went back in the middle of the night with a friend he had met in a halfway house, another shitbag who wanted to learn how to break into houses and steal money, as if people with nice houses keep stacks of cash around. It was around three in the morning. They saw Petit zonked out on the couch in the sunroom.

The younger of the two tried every door and window until he hit on the one that was unlocked: the basement bulkhead door. He walked in, found a baseball bat in the cellar, and went up to the sunporch. He lifted the bat over his head and brought it down onto Petit's skull — two, three, four, five times. Petit came to, didn't know if he was awake or asleep or alive or dead. Through the blood in his eyes, he could see that one of the men had a gun.

"If he moves, put two bullets in him," one said to the other.

Christine and Bill wanted to sit together in the courtroom, of course. But the victims' advocate, a representative of the court who helps victims through the legal process, told them that wasn't a good idea in front of the jury. Christine sat behind.

Unionville turns into North Washington. A cemetery rises on the left, across from a gas station.

"Oh, this is the cemetery that the girls are buried in," Christine says. "We could probably drive by there on the way back."

Bill doesn't say anything at first.

Vox clamantis in deserto.

"Yeah," he says after driving another hundred yards.

It had to be a hundred degrees the day they put that headstone in.

"Depends what time we get back. Sun goes down around 4:10 now," he says.

It took him a good two years, maybe three, to get it made the way he wanted. The funeral itself happened so quickly — the tragedy took place early on a Monday morning, and the funeral was that Friday. Bill went straight from the hospital to the church. All his clothes burned, so he was wearing a suit that a local tailor had donated after reading about the murders. The suit felt strange, like a rented tux. The stitches in his head were still red and tender and swollen.

Ron had taken care of everything. All I want is white caskets, Bill told him. You do the rest. And Ron did, perfectly.

But the headstone, that took some time, took until long after the paroxysm of that first week had dissolved into the unbearable daily routine of trying to live. Once you plant a rock in the grass with their names chiseled into it, it's set in stone, as they say. Right? It's final. When the task is done, and your mind is unoccupied, the gaping maw of the universe comes to swallow you whole. So Bill took his time, worked and worked on the stone, choosing the right one, getting the design just right, the shape. It's Virginia slate, and the man Bill bought it from said it came from so deep in the earth that it would last five hundred years.

At the top is a circle divided into four parts, each quadrant etched with an image.

A rose, for Michaela Rose.

A rower with a long ponytail, powering a scull through the water — Hayley was going to be on the crew team at Dartmouth.

An angel, with the hint of a smile — that represents all three of them. Jennifer was good to her core. She ran the health center at a boarding school, and she was like a mother to those girls. The worst thing she would ever say about another person was "He's a baddie." The preacher's daughter, not a mean bone.

Petit does this thing where he counts the days, hours, and minutes since the girls died. He has a computational mind, likes numbers, is always calculating.

One February day this year, he drove to the cemetery. There had been snow on the ground for weeks. Sometimes when it's cold and snowy, or when the rains come, there aren't many visitors. When Petit went that day, he didn't see footprints in the snow. It didn't bother him much — people are busy, and it was a cold winter. But he took a picture of the headstone and tweeted it. "5 years, 7 months and 24 days. We will never forget," he wrote.

In the fourth part of the circle, Petit chose the Latin phrase Vox clamantis in deserto. From the Old Testament. It's the Dartmouth College motto. Petit's alma mater. Hayley would have graduated two years ago by now.

A voice crying out in the wilderness.

2:30 P.M.

The office of the Petit Family Foundation is actually an office within an office, a small room with a desk, leased from a company that no longer needs the space. The foundation has two employees: Rolande Petit, the wife of Bill's cousin Tim, who grew up down the street from him, and Hayley Hovhanessian, the daughter of a guy Bill went to high school with. She met Hayley Petit at basketball camp at Miss Porter's School, and they became friends.

Christine says Hayley is the backbone of the foundation.

"Hey, Hayley-girl," Petit says as he and Christine walk into the office. Hayley is twenty-three, the same age Hayley Petit would be, and wears her long brown hair in a ponytail. She has bright saucer eyes that light up when she smiles.

Hayley-girl.

"Hey," she says, upbeat, grinning through a stack of papers. Petit looks at the yellow Post-it note on the pile. "Uh-oh," he says. "'Bill to Sign.' Oh, crap." Hayley keeps smiling. She knows he doesn't mind signing these letters. They have a system: Hayley and Rolande enter every donation into a database and generate a letter of thanks to be signed by Petit. He comes in a few times a week and signs and signs. If he knows the recipient personally, he crosses out the formal "Dear Mr. and Mrs." and handwrites their first names. There are lots of donations from strangers, mostly checks, but sometimes a single, heartbreaking dollar bill stuffed in an envelope with a scrawled letter.

Petit sometimes writes little notes as he signs. He holds one up for Christine.

"Can you read my handwriting at all, or is it just a mess?"

She tries to read: "'Thank you for... this... my'—something."

"Thank you for this very generous gift."

Christine frowns. "Show me four letters in that word. Show me two, even. Put the front end on the v at least."

Bill puts the front end on the v and moves to the next letter in the pile. "Here's a guy I went to medical school with. He's an anesthesiologist in Pennsylvania now." He scratches out some words on the bottom. Christine peers over his shoulder and reads.

"'Very... Christmas.'"

"That's 'Merry Christmas.' Come on."

Hayley-girl.

It just comes out. That's what he used to call his firstborn. Hayley-girl. It just comes out sometimes when he sees Hayley at the office.

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The Petit house was so badly burned that it had to be razed and carted away, foundation and all. Neighbors have made the property into a memorial garden, but Petit hasn't been back since that night.

She was a force of nature, Hayley was. You never saw anyone work so hard at school. Always a book in her hand. Over at Aunt Hanna's house, she would flop down on that chair by the kitchen with her book. In the car on the way to basketball games, she read her book in the backseat next to her dad as he worked. Even on that last family vacation, to Cape Cod, ten days before she was murdered, she had a book with her the whole time.

She lived for seventeen years. She was beautiful. Six feet tall by the time she graduated from high school. Chestnut hair, a smile like she knew everything would be all right. Bill took her everywhere, even when she was little. If he had to make his rounds at the hospital on a weekend, he took her along, wanted to show her the world. When she got older, he took her to basketball games at the University of Connecticut, and it became their thing. They had season tickets for both the men's and women's teams. Usually it was Bill, Hayley, Hanna, and Bill Sr. That was the core. Sometimes Michaela came along, and Jen went to two or three games a year — that was enough for her. But Hayley always went. She was always so busy, rowing crew, cocaptain of the basketball team, doing her homework until after midnight sometimes, up in that second-floor office with Bill. She pushed herself so hard. At the games, though — at the games, it was glorious. Him and Hayley, standing and cheering from the minute the Huskies ran onto the court. They knew every player, every statistic by heart. It was fun. Just so much... fun.

One of the letters in the stack on Hayley's desk at the foundation is written in a child's hand.

"Oh, these boys are great," Petit says. There are these three brothers, he explains, and every year at their birthday party, instead of asking for presents, they ask their friends to make a donation to the Petit Family Foundation. And they mail a check for, like, seventy-two dollars, with a note.

"Dear Dr. Petit," this one says. "How are you? I just had my 10th birthday party. I invited all my friends and family. We celebrated at my favorite place, the Sports Arena. Like my brothers, I wanted to donate my presents to your foundation. I hope these donations help your awesome foundation to help others who are less fortunate."

It can be overwhelming, the support. Checks for $10,000. And things like this — kids donating their birthday presents. Can you imagine? Ten-year-old kid? The foundation is going good now. People understand the mission statement, and when the applications for grants roll in, they usually fit in with it somehow: "foster the education of young people, especially women in the sciences; to improve the lives of those affected by chronic illnesses; and to support efforts to protect and help those affected by violence." Petit knows the girls would be proud, especially Jennifer. The foundation does an annual golf tournament and a road race. The next few years will be interesting. See if the donations keep coming. It would be nice if the foundation got to where it was self-sustaining, living off its own interest. For now, the board meets every two months, and Petit drives all over the state drumming up support, handing out big cardboard checks, shaking hands, saying a few words, flashing his best smile. He's the face of the thing. The day he loses the energy to keep showing up is the day they spend the few million dollars in the kitty and close up shop.

But for now, it is what Bill does every day. In that way, it's how they all live on — Jennifer, Hayley, Michaela, and Bill.

For the first few years, he did all these appearances alone. His parents were usually there, sure, and Hanna, and Ron, and his brother Glenn, and his friends. But when it came time to step up to the podium or cut the ribbon, it was Bill Petit. Now he has a date, a partner, someone to drive there with and drive home with, and that's no small thing. Now he has a wife. His second wife. Miss Christine, he calls her sometimes. Christine, who hangs funky chandeliers and paints things purple. Funny, brassy, blond Miss Christine, whose laugh is like an aria and who says what she feels and so be it.

"Bill's so good at going to everything," she says. "Those relationships, the face-to-face. So many people have supported the foundation, and so many of those people have their own foundations, and they really like it when he's at their events. I bought more dresses this year than in my whole life. Remember we went to that black tie and you were like, Why don't you have anything you can wear? He thinks it's normal to have all these black-tie outfits."

"What black tie did we go to?"

"New Britain."

"Oh yeah. The museum?"

"Yeah, and you can't wear the same dress you wore to the last one — hello, same people. And we have three events in the next week and a half that are all dress-up. And we're going with his best friend's wife to every one of them."

"Ron and Susan. So just call Susan and agree to wear the same dress," Bill says.

Christine just looks at him.

Petit asked Christine to marry him the night before New Year's Eve, 2011. They were living in a 572-square-foot house on a lake. It was small and they were only there a few months, but it was the first place they lived together that neither had lived in before, so it was exciting — the newness.

She went out with a few friends early in the night for some Christmas drinks and came home to find the house mostly dark and Bill sitting on the bed. She kicked off her shoes and took her coat off and flopped down next to him. Then she saw that he was holding the ring box in his hand.

The next night, they went to Ron Bucchi's house to spend New Year's Eve with Ron and Susan. Susan and Jennifer were friends, seeing each other mostly at countless country-club events, and now Susan had taken a real liking to Christine. The Bucchis live in a fabulous house on a suburban cul-de-sac, a house they designed themselves. Susan and Christine went off to the kitchen. As Ron put away their coats, Bill gave him a nudge and told him, almost in a whisper, that he was going to announce to him and Susan that night that he had asked Christine to marry him.

Act happy even if you're not, Bill said with a smirk.

Ron clapped him on the back and said, What are you talking about? I'm happy!

It was just that Bill knew people worried about him. Nothing to do with Christine. In fact, Christine was perfect.

When she was growing up, sometimes someone from their church who had nowhere else to go would stay with her family. Christine's mom is a psychiatric nurse, and from her Christine learned how to listen. How to be there and not say anything. Early on when they were dating, if she saw Bill going to a dark place in his mind, she was quiet, just holding his hand. He used to thank her for that. "For what?" she would ask. And he would tell her that a lot of people don't know how to not do anything, and that's usually what he needed. Just an easy silence.

The nightmares aren't the tough part. She comforts him as anyone would comfort a child. The tough part is looking past his unmoving face and trying to read whether at any particular moment he feels unspeakable pain or feels like going out for a sandwich. Sometimes in the car, on the way to an event, they'll be all dressed up, she's cracking jokes, and suddenly the mood in the car just drops like a rock. Sometimes she tries to lift it back up, and sometimes she knows to let it fall.

Slowly, it's getting easier. And always, she jokes. "You don't like doing dishes, do you?" she'll say. "And how'd that go over with Jennifer?"

And Bill laughs.

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Twenty-five thousand pieces of mail came after that night, from all over the world. Some sent money for the foundation, a dollar bill tucked into a sympathy card, or a $5,000 check. No matter, the Petit family would answer them all, by hand.

3:45 P.M.

—Peaceful, easy feeling, and I know you won't let me down.

"Finally," Petit says, settling on a radio station. He turns the volume up a tiny bit. They're back in the car now, he and Christine, heading over to see his parents.

'Cause I'm alllll-ready standing... on the ground.

"Do-do-do, do-do-do, do-do-do," Petit sings, doing the instrumental part, tapping the wheel as he pulls into the driveway. This is where he lived for more than four years after the murders.

Long driveway. Could fit twenty cars, easy. It was full every day for weeks after it happened. Relatives, mostly. Friends. The grocer, an old friend, had so many orders for the Petits he called Barbara to see if she wanted him to space them out, so they wouldn't spoil. Delivery trucks. Mail, so much mail. People coming and going. Petit would look out the window every once in a while, from the second-floor room that was now his.

Bill Sr. and Barbara, Petit's parents, bought the biggest house in town about twenty years ago. Neither came from money, but he made a good living running neighborhood stores. The house was built in 1923 by the richest man in town, name of Norton. By the time Billy was a boy, in the late fifties and early sixties, the sloping acres behind it had become Norton Park, where Billy and Hanna Petit and their brothers and every kid in the neighborhood used to play every afternoon until dinnertime. Billy goes by the house a few times a week, usually with Christine.

Inside, Billy's mom is fishing through boxes of Christmas ornaments. A Christmas tree, a good eight feet, stands in the bright entry hall at the center of the house. This is the first Christmas the Petits have put up a tree since 2006.

"Looks good," he says to his dad.

Bill Sr. leans in. At seventy-nine the guy looks great, and his voice is still strong and deep and clear, but the ears aren't so good.

"The tree. Looks good," Billy says a little louder.

"Oh, yeah."

Photographs of Bill Sr. and Barbara's grandchildren hang along the grand staircase, which is outfitted with those automatic chairs that carry people up and down. On the top are Hayley's senior-year photo and Michaela's last school picture before she was murdered. She was in the fifth grade.

At the top of the stairs, Barbara has boxes stacked and labeled, full of stuff for the foundation. Lord knows there's no room for them in the little office downtown, so here they are. There's an attic space on the third floor, and that's where the letters are.

Remember how they used to come? Those white postal bins. Overflowing. Every day, sometimes two deliveries a day.

Barbara climbs the steps, opens a door at the end of the hall, and switches on a single lightbulb. There, stacked in even rows on the floorboards of the attic, are the boxes. The kind of boxes you see used for legal papers, usually. Stacked two and three on top of one another, reaching almost up to the rafters and the insulation under the roof of the house. Each box labeled with a Sharpie in Barbara's hand. Billy's mail.

People didn't know what to do, so they sent money. Five dollars. A thousand dollars. Five thousand. Fifty bucks. Tucked into drugstore sympathy cards. Or folded into notes composed with careful hands, printed on plain paper, signed at the bottom. Some brief and polite, some long and personal. Some really long and really personal. Some from children. Some from friends down the street. The post office in Plainville was great about it. Some of the envelopes just said "William Petit, Connecticut," but they knew where to take it.

"I am sure you have heard this from many people but I hope you know how much your courage and strength has changed my life. When I am having a moment where I am fretting about the small stuff, I think of you and count my blessings."

From a family that Jen used to babysit for when she was a teenager: "It was easy to see why our son took to his new babysitter very quickly and developed the biggest crush on her.... For those that are faithful while on this earth I know when God calls us home it is to a place where we cannot understand the peace, love and wonder of this place called heaven. Jenny and your daughters are there now with the Lord watching over them."

"I hope you feel better Dr. William Petit Jr."

A lot of religious stuff. CDs. Religious music, Josh Groban — songs people find inspirational. Books about Holocaust survivors. Letters from prisoners. Letters from people in China and Ireland and Italy. Letters from women wondering if Bill needed a friend. A cake from a baker in Alaska. Cards from entire first-grade classes. Buckets and buckets of mail.

Bill's parents, his sister Hanna, his brother Glenn, his aunts and uncles and cousins who populated the Petit's stately brick house in the days and weeks afterward — everyone wondered what to do with it all.

"We're going to answer it," Bill said.

And so they answered it. The family sat in an assembly line around the table on the porch and wrote responses by hand. If there wasn't a return address, they went online to try to find it, or called information. A family friend showed Hanna how to catalog each piece of mail in a computer spreadsheet: name, address, type of letter, date received, date responded to. And then everything went into boxes.

No one organizes like Barbara — with five kids, you had to. She has a special closet just for tablecloths, which she keeps pressed and on hangers with plastic over them. For Billy's mail, she wrapped elastic bands around each bundle and stacked them neatly in their designated box. Then she and Bill Sr. hauled them one by one, dozens of boxes, to the third-floor attic, where they sit.

"I don't know why I did all this," Barbara says. She stands there for a few long minutes, one hand on her hip, the other resting on the lid of a box. There are at least twenty-five thousand pieces of mail up here. Mail that came for her boy, to make him feel better.

"I just did," she says.

4:00 P.M.

The chamaecyparis tree out back, behind Bill and Barbara's house, used to be by the driveway at Petit's old house. They had it transplanted.

"That one in the right front of the garage — I'm sorry, in the right front of the garden — was right by the driveway by the garage, by where we had the basketball hoop," Petit says, looking out the back window at it. "I think about shooting hoops with Hayley and the ball bouncing off the chamaecyparis."

The house in Cheshire had to be demolished. Hanna had been inside a few times, had walked across the charred, soaked floor, had breathed in the ugly black air that hung in every room.

Bill, still recovering from his beating, once asked her to look for something in a drawer in the kitchen.

"Bill," she told him. "There are no more drawers. There's no more kitchen." The invaders had soaked everything with gas, trying to destroy the evidence, including three human beings. They didn't know that half the Cheshire Police Department was circling the house. But the fire burned too quick. Weeks later, Ron went a couple of times to meet with the insurance adjuster. They stood in the driveway and talked, and Ron said he could go inside with the guy. The insurance man asked Ron if he had been inside since the fire. No, Ron said, he hadn't. "Don't," the man said. "The owner is your friend? Don't go in. It's the worst thing I've ever seen."

When Hayley was about three, Petit planted a Japanese maple on the other side of the driveway from the chamaecyparis. It was maybe two feet tall when he planted it. There were rhododendrons on the north end of the house that Jen and Bill used to deadhead, to try to maximize the number of blooms. And they had a huge viburnum in the front yard, which had these spectacular white flowers in the springtime and little berries in the summer and the fall. Petit barely touched that thing and it grew like mad. People would stop and take pictures.

One sunny fall day a few months after the murders, a fleet of trucks showed up at Bill's parents' house, where he was living. Flatbeds and pickups loaded with his trees and bushes, their gargantuan root balls swathed in burlap. Trays and trays of perennials, the dark soil still clinging to their stringy white roots. There was the chamaecyparis. There was the Japanese maple, purple and majestic and delicate, carefully strapped to the truck so it wouldn't topple. One truck carried the rhododendrons from the north side of the house. There was the viburnum. Michaela's four-o'clocks.

Bill was out at the time. He drove in the driveway and saw them laid out neatly in the yard, all these beautiful, vibrant plants from a life he would never see again.

All winter he worked on designing a garden in his parents' backyard. It would be in the shape of a heart — the base would be just behind the sunporch, and the plants would go around both sides before meeting in the middle at a—

"I wanna say trellis. Not called a trellis," Petit says. "What's it called?"

"Arbor?" says Christine.

They're outside his parents' house now, surveying the damage from a recent winter storm, and giving a tour of the garden.

"Arch. Oh, and there are some big lights up on that tree. There were big lights on those trees there, but that came down in the last storm. And over there, that's a — I was gonna say ambrosia but it's not that."

Christine offers, "Rhododendron?"

"No, no. Not mountain laurels. No." Bill is scratching his chin, staring at the plants. He doesn't like not being able to call up the name. He likes knowing every name — in Latin.

"That's a mountain laurel or a rhodie, isn't it?" Christine says.

"No, you're 0 for 2. It's a... crap. It's not crap, it's — well, those are scabiosa there. Button flowers."

"It's not a mountain laurel?"

"No, not even close, dear."

"Get a book out."

"Artemisia? No. Arte — andromeda."

Christine was so nervous when she came over to photograph the garden, her first assignment for the foundation. She liked Bill, but she didn't know he liked her, too. She thought maybe, but...

Then, as they were walking through the garden — him pointing out the different species in Latin, her taking pictures — he stopped, looked at her, and reached up and touched her earring. Her heart jumped. She rushed away, started taking pictures again.

"I was like, whoa! I gotta go!"

Bill rolls his eyes and smiles when he hears her retell it.

"I just asked you where you got 'em or something," he says.

"I know," she says. "But — you were closer than normal."

"Okay."

"It was one of my favorite moments."

He looks right at her, smiles. "Okay."

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Petit with Michaela, Hayley, and Jennifer on Cape Cod, July 2007, about ten days before they were killed. Their murderers are now both on death row in Connecticut.

5:10 P.M.

Christine enters the Central Cafe before Bill. He's outside talking to his brother Glenn, who's been a champ through all this. Sat with Billy every night in the hospital that first week. Went with Hanna to identify the bodies. Told Billy not to go, to remember them as they were. Told him Jen was unrecognizable.

Tickets are twenty bucks a head tonight, all proceeds going to the Plainville Community Food Pantry. You get two free drink tickets — when Petit finally wanders in he orders a Bud and Christine gets a Guinness. Over in the back corner is a raffle table, and Petit buys a couple of tickets, stuffs them in the box. He knows the ladies doing the raffle and chats them up over the music. In Plainville, everybody knows Bill Petit. Not because of what happened to his family. Everybody always knew Bill Petit. His dad used to own every store in town, it seemed like, and served on the Chamber of Commerce, the town council. His mom was on the library board. And Billy used to work in his dad's stores, manning the register before he was thirteen years old. He was already up to six feet tall by then, so he looked older, and he was so mature, so smart, so well mannered — Bill Sr. didn't think twice about leaving the kid in charge.

Petit parks himself by the tables where the food is. There are these little chicken, bacon, and pineapple skewers that are just delicious, and he downs three of them with another Bud. Just then, two kids walk in, a boy around eight who looks momentarily stunned to be in a bar full of grown-ups, and a bouncing redheaded girl of five or six. "Here comes trouble," Petit says, his eyes going wide. The boy stares, the girl just looks up at him with a shy grin. Petit scooches down so he's on their level. He grabs a bunch of grapes and swings them in front of the girl's eyes, but she shakes her head. "What? You don't like grapes?" he asks with mock consternation. He turns back to the table, scans it for something they might want. Baby carrots.

The boy says he doesn't like carrots.

"You don't want a — well that's good because this isn't a carrot," he says. "It's French. It's a carrot." He pronounces the word with a thick French accent: cah-roe. The boy giggles a little bit, and the girl takes him up on it and eats the carrot. He asks them about school, about what they want for Christmas, about anything he can think of. He's bent down talking to these kids for a good five minutes, the roomful of grown-ups swirling around him.

At the beginning, after it happened, Petit could hardly stand to be around kids. Even the ones he loved most — especially the ones he loved most. Hanna's kids were the most difficult. Hayley was two years older than Hanna's Abby, and Hanna's Andrew was a year older than Michaela. Abby is more of an extrovert than Hayley ever was — goofier, louder. Hayley was pretty shy, actually. Abby used to run across the field at Hayley's school yelling her name and shouting "I love you!" and tackle her, sending the two of them into a tangle of limbs and squeals on the grass. Michaela, she thought Andrew was the coolest. Michaela wasn't much for UConn basketball — not like Hayley and her dad — but if Andrew was going to a game, she was there.

At the beginning, after it happened, it was too much. He felt like he made Abby and Andrew miserable. He felt like an ogre, big, sad Uncle Billy, who they suddenly didn't know how to act around, or how to talk to.

He told Hanna, who responded by saying, Well, you know what? They make you sad and miserable, too, don't they?

He thought about it.

Yeah, of course they did. Well, not miserable. He loved them. But — it was overwhelming to be around kids who knew the girls. All he saw were Hayley and Michaela. It wasn't fair to anyone.

After a couple of hours at the Central, Bill and Christine start working their way out of the room. Christine, coat in hand, is chatting with someone, and Bill is a few steps behind, finishing his beer, talking to some old classmate or another. Right now he's just a guy at a bar, having a good time.

And then, "Excuse me, Dr. Petit?"

A woman wearing a brown leather coat and hoopy earrings is standing in front of him. She is probably in her forties, with frosted blond hair, warm, forlorn eyes, and a bashful smile. She speaks quietly and politely. "Do you recognize my voice?"

Hoo boy. This happens sometimes. People approach him, people he met once maybe, who remember him because he's Bill Petit but who, for him, are part of an endless parade of truly kind people who are sometimes hard to place. He purses his lips and looks at the floor.

"Okay, talk a little more so I have a chance," he says.

She says her name is Dawn, and that they've talked a lot over the years. It turns out she worked at one of the answering services his medical practice used, so she called him probably a hundred times over the years with messages from patients, at all hours.

Dawn doesn't get too close to Petit. "I always wanted to come up to you during one of the road races, but I didn't want to bother you," she says. "I just wanted to say I'm sorry." He gives her a little hug, thanks her, and follows his wife out into the night.

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THE FOLLOWING TUESDAY

Dr. William A. Petit Jr. is standing in the cafeteria of the Connecticut Children's Medical Center at Hartford Hospital, staring at a man made out of Legos. It's a chilly, blue December afternoon outside. Inside, the cafeteria is almost empty. The room, all bright colors and happy posters, is at the base of a swirling atrium that spirals up six floors. It looks like the bottom of a missile silo that was decorated by children. Rainbow crepe-paper mobiles bob from the ceiling. The floor tiles shine and squeak. The air smells like French fries. Off in a corner, a security guard pays for a Snapple, joking in Spanish with the girl behind the register.

Petit knows this hospital well. He knows every hospital in the state. He's an endocrinologist, endocrinology being a branch of internal medicine dealing with the glands that deliver hormones to the bloodstream — his particular expertise is treating diabetes and thyroid problems. He is the former director of the prestigious Joslin Diabetes Center at the Hospital of Central Connecticut, and a co-author of The Encyclopedia of Diabetes, a definitive 436-page text. He has given speeches all over the country.

He is one of the best.

But he is not here today as a doctor. He hasn't practiced medicine since the day before the murders. He's here because the Petit Family Foundation gave a $500 grant to the knitting club at Bulkeley High School, a fortress of a school in a poor, banged-up part of Hartford. Some of the girls have knit scarves and hats for the sick children in the hospital, and they've come to deliver their gifts. Wilma Hoffman, the lady with orange beauty-parlor hair who runs the knitting club, invited Petit to come. He is always invited to come, and he always shows up. It's important, he thinks, to go — lets people know he appreciates the good work they do. He knows it's him they want to see, the man who runs the foundation, the man who crisscrosses the state, who signs every check, the man whose family was murdered.

The Lego man is life-sized, just a few inches shorter than Petit, who is a good six foot three. Petit looks at the toy statue blankly, raises his eyebrows for an almost imperceptible second, like a heartbeat on a cardiograph. His wife's camera is around his neck, and he takes a picture.

This is a fun one, the knitting club. The half dozen students here with Wilma don't say much aside from some nudged whispers among one another. A girl from Burma speaks not a word as she presents Petit with a knit cap, which he puts on as he makes a goofy face. Another girl, Cristal, who could be a junior but has the round, bright face of a girl a few years younger, sits on a radiator, knitting. Wilma announces to everyone that Cristal is knitting a hat for her six-month-old baby.

Wilma is great. Some people, you'd give them five hundred bucks and they'd say thanks, see you later. Not Wilma. She sends in every receipt — twelve dollars and forty-five cents for yarn, everything — so that the foundation can see where its money is going. Exactitude. Petit loves it.

Wilma asks Petit if he wants to say anything. The girls stare and fidget. He pauses, then begins: "What you do to help others probably makes you all feel better as well." His voice is soft, and he clips each sentence at the end, letting a beat pass before starting the next. "And while doing those things, you're teaching your classmates about caring for other people. You set off a chain reaction. People say, Huh, they're taking their time and doing this, maybe there's something to it. So it's very nice for you to set the example, especially at your age, help other people with things, and not expecting anything in return."

He pauses, and then he adds, his voice even softer now, "You're quiet leaders."

He is looking past the girls now, past Wilma, past this dim, sterile, hot room to another anonymous institutional room — Courtroom 6A, New Haven Superior Courthouse.

Hayley went to Sunday school each week, and all the teachers wanted her in their class, as she was a natural leader — though quiet.

In Connecticut, the victims of a crime may make a victim's impact statement, affirming for the record how a crime has affected their lives. It comes at the end — after the trial, after the verdict, when the sentence has already been determined. It serves no obvious legal purpose.

I learned many things from Michaela's teachers after she died that I wish they had told me before. One teacher said she always made an effort to go over to someone who was ignored by others in the class.

But the victim's impact statement lets the record show that when Michaela Rose Petit drew her last breath in her bed, surrounded by her stuffed animals, and when Hayley Elizabeth Petit collapsed in the upstairs hall just outside her bedroom, running to try to save her family before she was overcome by smoke, and when Jennifer Lynn Hawke-Petit's larynx was crushed by the hands of a stranger who had broken into her home — in those horrible few minutes, the world became and would forever be a poorer place.

I miss Michaela running to the door and yelling "Da-Da's home!" On Friday nights, when she went to Great-grandma's house, she always called my cell phone and wanted to know when I would be there and what I wanted for dinner. When I arrived, she made a great show of serving me specially and watching me eat....

Late in her senior year, I learned something from her friends. I heard her friends talking about WWHD and I said, "What?" They laughed and smiled and said, "When we have a problem we say 'WWHD.' 'What would Hayley do?' Because that usually leads to the right answer."...

When you are with someone twenty-six years, it takes a long time for habits to change. For months, and still on occasion, I start to think, "I'll just ask Jen."...

In the late nineties she developed strange symptoms and, as a nurse, always thought the worst — she figured she had brain cancer. When she actually found out she had MS, she was relieved, because it was treatable — though she secretly feared deteriorating and not being able to care for Hayley and Michaela....

What do I miss? I miss my entire family, my home, everything we had together....

"Well this has been very, very nice." It's Wilma talking, thanking Dr. Petit and the cheery hospital administrators for having the girls from the knitting club come for a tour. "I'm sure the girls appreciate this."

And Bill Petit stands, folds his knit cap into the pocket of his winter jacket, places his wife's hand in his, and turns up his lips in a smile.

7:15 P.M.

Christine warms some apple pie and spoons a blob of whipped cream on it for her husband. Outside the sliding doors, the colored lights she strung on the deck hang like planets against the black backdrop of the invisible river beyond.

He sits in his chair, scooping up the pie.

It's getting late, but not for him. He used to take sleep medication after the tragedy. He didn't sleep more than two hours in a night for the first three months, but finally he found the combination of pills that numbed his brain enough that he could sleep. The problem then was, the more sleep he got, the more nightmares he had. And the deeper he slept, the greater the chance that he would wake up in the morning and, for a wonderful, terrible split-second, forget.

He doesn't use the pills much anymore. They make him groggy all the next day. But he gets about five hours most nights, which isn't terrible. He's gotten used to just not sleeping much. But on a bad night — on a bad night he's lucky to get two or three. He keeps a few lights on in the living room all night.

Petit breathes deep.

"In the beginning when I couldn't sleep, it was always that night," he says. "In the beginning it was always late at night, since it started to happen at two or three in the morning" — that's when the men broke in — "so I'd be bolt-awake at 3:00 A.M. just like clockwork, no matter what. If I hadn't fallen asleep or if I had just fallen asleep at two-thirty, I'd be awake at three. And then it sorta switched to the mornings. The mornings got bad. It would just always be right in front of me." Those men again, come to end the world. He holds his palm, rigid, right up to his face. "Right in front of your face."

Petit heard a sound coming through the floor. He was in the basement of his home, the house in Cheshire he and Jennifer had made over eighteen years. Over there was the puppet theater the girls used when they were little, to put on shows. A life-sized poster of one of the UConn women's players, one of their idols, hung next to the bulkhead door leading up to the backyard. It was all blurry. Everything. He was tied to the steel pole in the center of the basement, his hands bound to it with plastic zip ties and clothesline. He had to get out. Blood was flowing into his eyes. He was a doctor — that much he could remember — and he knew that if he raised and lowered his body up and down the pole, he could keep his blood pressure up and maybe he wouldn't keep slipping into unconsciousness.

Up and down, up and down, up and down.

He had been taking Coumadin, a prescription blood thinner, which only made the blood gush from his head wounds faster. And he had a pacemaker, sewn into his heart a few years ago. He could barely slide his frame up the pole. No way he could take on two younger men who had a gun. If he escaped, he would crawl outside through the bulkhead door and over to Simcik's, next door, where he could call for help. He had to stay alive. For hours he struggled to stay conscious, unaware of what the men upstairs were doing to his family.

Thump, thump, thump.

What the hell was that?

He thought the thumping was the sound of the men gathering the furniture and other stuff they were going to steal, getting it ready to load into a car or something. He couldn't bring himself to imagine that it was the sound of his wife, Jennifer, being raped on their living-room floor.

"Hey," he groaned as loud as he could. It took all the strength he had to make a sound. His head throbbed. There was blood all over the cement basement floor, mostly from his head but also from his wrists and ankles, where the ties had cut through his skin.

"Don't worry," one of them yelled down. "It's all going to be over in a couple of minutes."

And then it was over, and there was nothing left. Even after his wounds healed, Bill Petit himself was more dead than alive. But he was not dead. And life, as it turns out, wants to live. And little miracles happen. Christine.

Christine is determined to keep things light. To keep things happy, to have some fun. She understands the irony of her position, knows that if all had gone according to plan, Bill never would have married her, and that this life with her husband wouldn't exist. Which is a strange thing. But she gets that. And she never wants him to forget one minute of that life he built, that life he loved. For eighteen years he lived in the same house, slept in the same bed with the same woman. When he reached over to turn on the light by his bed, his hand knew where to go in the darkness.

Life after death requires great effort, and she herself gets down sometimes, too. But Christine is also warm, and vital, and in life it's just good to have someone to hold you as you sleep, you know? Before they started dating, she saw him mostly through her camera lens. Smaller than life, drifting across the frame, his lips moving as he spoke to someone on the other side of the room. "I watched him for years at those events, because I had to photograph him," she says. "And it was years before I could even get a smile. But then he sorta started to — you could just see things changing. Things were starting to lift just a little. And then there was this humor that was just shocking. When he's in a good mood, forget it. Which was hugely important to me. Because you don't want to be involved with someone who you can't have a normal life with. Who's not going to be fun."

She tucks her feet underneath her on the chair, pulls on the sleeves of her sweater, cups her tea with both hands. She looks over and smiles at Bill. He's done with his pie.

"Right?"

9:40 P.M.

He once dreaded the inevitability of night. People have always been afraid of the dark, from the beginning, but not Bill Petit, not before the night consumed his family. But now, in the hours before bed, Petit is starting to feel the kind of calm most of us feel every night before sleep. It's a calmness he last truly felt on that warm Sunday night in 2007 when he fell asleep on the couch, tired after an afternoon in the July sun playing golf with his dad and a pasta dinner with his wife and daughters. Maybe it's his supreme rationality again asserting itself, or a simple resignation to the rhythms of the day, or just maybe the blessing of a resilient heart and someone to talk to come evening, but Bill Petit is starting to face the darkness the way he used to.

He reads in the living room, magazines mostly. Golf magazines, Sports Illustrated, The Week. He and Christine talk about the things couples talk about — that woman at the party who was so nice but just would not stop talking, and who's going to take which car tomorrow, and whether there's any pie left. He looks at Twitter on his iPad, which he finds an efficient way to follow world events. Usually the local news is on TV in the background. Sometimes they watch the end of a movie they didn't finish the night before. On this night, Christine gets tired and says it's time for bed — "It's time for bed," she says — and her new husband walks down the hall, past the hum of the dishwasher, past the framed finger painting that Hayley did when she was little, past the small room they'll use as an office when Bill finishes setting it up, to the tiny bedroom in the house on the river. And he gets ready for sleep, the daily hibernation in which each of us, every night, is at our most peaceful and our most vulnerable. The nights never will be the same, but Bill Petit's face is placid as he breathes in deep enough to feel the air fill his chest, lets it out slowly, reaches over to turn off the light, and closes his eyes.

EARLIER: "The Survivor," the 2011 story of Bill Petit

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Ryan D'Agostino
Ryan D'Agostino is Editorial Director, Projects at Hearst, and previously served as Editor-in-Chief at Popular Mechanics and Articles Editor at Esquire.