“Boo!” Ella called, but she looked thrilled as she ran back over and grabbed Sandy’s hand. It was sweet seeing them together, and I had to will myself not to think about the sister Ella never had.

“Ella, Daddy is going to take you upstairs to get you ready for bed. I have to talk to Sandy for a minute.” I tousled her hair and kissed her cheek. “I’ll be up to say good night.”

“Boo!” Ella went again, giggling as Justin scooped her up onto his shoulder and headed for the stairs.

When I turned back, Sandy was stacking the Candy Land cards meticulously back into the box. As if her life depended on it. She was smiling a little bit. No, not smiling. Grimacing. I pulled a chair out and sat down across from her. When I reached over and put a hand on hers, still gripping some of the cards, Sandy’s fingers were ice-cold.

“Is she dead?” she asked. Quiet, matter-of-fact, as though she’d been waiting to hear that all along, maybe her whole life.

“They found her car, that’s all we know,” I said gently. “It looks like maybe she had an accident near the Palisades Parkway.”

“The Palisades?” Sandy looked up at me. “But that’s not on her way home. That’s nowhere near anything. Where was she headed?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess no one does yet.”

“Can we go?” She stood up and looked around. “To where her car is?”

“Oh, they didn’t tell me where exactly.” Even if they had, I never would have taken Sandy out there to possibly watch her mother’s dead body being dragged from some ditch. “They promised to call as soon as they know something. And then we’ll go right away, okay?”

“Okay,” she said reluctantly, lowering herself back down on the chair.

“Let me just run upstairs and say good night to Ella. She’ll never go to sleep otherwise. If you haven’t heard from the police by the time I get back down, I’ll call them again.”

“What about Hannah?” Sandy asked. “How is she?”

“They think she’s going to be okay,” I said, though that was a bit of an overstatement. I put a hand on Sandy’s shoulder as I stood. “Right now you need to focus on taking care of yourself. I’ll bet you haven’t eaten. I’ll send Justin down to make you something.”

“Okay,” Sandy said, though it was obvious she wasn’t about to eat a thing.

Justin was in Ella’s bedroom, snuggling her deep into her sea of stuffed animals—an ice cream sandwich with big goofy eyes, three dogs, and a panda bear in a flowered sundress. Her eyelids were heavy with sleep.

“I’m going to go change,” Justin said, kissing me as he headed out of the room.

I crouched next to Ella’s bed and pressed my forehead against hers. She hugged my head with her hot hands, so hard that she almost pulled out some of my hair.

“I missed you tonight,” I said. A mother wasn’t supposed to say that. I’d heard that once. But I didn’t care anymore. Because it was true. And true had to matter more than right.

“I love you, too, Mommy,” Ella said. “To the dinosaurs and back.”

“Good night, Peanut.” I kissed her face again and again until she giggled, then I pushed myself to my exhausted feet. “Light on or off?”

“Off,” Ella said sleepily. “Bye-bye, Mommy.”

I lingered in the doorway, watching Ella fall asleep. She was so perfect right now, just like that. I couldn’t be sure of how things would turn out, but I could be sure of that much. And that was something.

I headed to the guest bedroom to pull the shades and turn down the bed. To get the room ready for what would likely be Sandy’s long and terrible night to come. The police would call any minute, almost certainly with bad news. That would be followed by the long drive to the hospital and the heartbreaking identification of Sandy’s mother, the gathering of her personal effects. It would all be tragic, devastating, and it would likely be the middle of the night by the time we got home. Sandy would be wrecked and exhausted, and I didn’t want to have to be fussing around her then.

I turned on the small bedside lamp and rearranged the pillows twice. As if any of that could make the inevitable awfulness better. I was so distracted by my handiwork as I walked around the end of the bed that I crashed right into Sandy’s boxes stacked against the wall. The top one tipped over, its contents spilling out into a sad mess on the floor. I kneeled down, quickly gathering up the photos and papers, some plastic cups and silverware, hopelessly trying to put it back the way it had been. I didn’t want Sandy to think I’d been invading her privacy or, worse, to feel embarrassed that I’d seen what was left of her world.

I was about to toss in the last thing: a plastic bag filled with some scraps of paper, ticket stubs, a take-out menu—a sack of mementos—when I saw a long smudge of brownish red on the corner. That wasn’t blood, was it? I held it up to take a closer look. It did look a lot like blood. God, blood from that night. Thinking about it made me feel sick. I peered at one of the notes inside. It was a thank-you from Rhea, addressed to Hannah. It had an address written in a girlish hand in a blank space at the bottom. These were the things Hannah had given Sandy for safekeeping: her memories from the baby’s father. I was about to put the bag back in the box when a smaller slip of paper at the bottom caught my eye.

I pressed my face closer to the smudged plastic, my heart already beating hard.

No. I snapped my eyes closed.

That hadn’t been—couldn’t be.

I was tired. I was seeing things. I had to be. I squeezed my eyes tighter.

But when I opened them again, they were still there at the bottom of that blood-streaked bag. Little scraps of paper. Lots of them. And on them, lines of poetry written in Justin’s familiar hand.

I didn’t feel my feet moving, but they must have. Because soon I was standing in our bedroom, staring at Justin, gripping the blood-streaked plastic bag in one hand. The fingers of my other hand clenched into a fist. I was deep underwater, the sound roiling and bent against my ears. Justin was sitting there on the bed, pulling on a sweatshirt like it was any other day. As I watched him, the pressure around my head felt like it was going to crush my skull.

And there was Justin, saying something to me. Talking like the world had not just been incinerated. Like we were not reduced to embers.

When I put Hannah’s bag of notes on the bed next to him, he fell silent. Froze.

He stared and stared and stared at that bag. And all I wanted him to do was look confused. For him to say “What?” or “Why?” or “I don’t understand.” But he didn’t say anything. He didn’t say a word. Instead, he dropped his face in his hands and kept it there for a horribly long time. I must have backed up, retreated to the wall, because all of a sudden my back was pressed against it.

When Justin looked at me, his eyes were wide and terrified. “Molly,” he began, shaking his head.

And then he crossed the room to me. His arms soon locked around me like a cage. All I wanted to do was break free. To break him. To run. Except I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even breathe.

“I would do anything to take it back, Molly,” he breathed into my rigid neck. “It was such a stupid, selfish mistake. I just—and this isn’t an excuse, because it’s my fault—I just missed you. I loved you and I missed you and I wanted you back. And I couldn’t— I didn’t know how to reach you.”

“No,” I said. The word sliced the back of my throat.

But it wasn’t a yell. Or a sob. Or a scream. Just a statement: No. No, what? No, it didn’t happen. No, you didn’t miss me? No, you didn’t love me. No. This. Cannot. Be.

“It was so long ago, too, Molly. Months,” he said, rushing on with his panicked explanations. Like he was only now realizing the awful enormity of what was happening. “It ended before we ever moved here, I swear. Things were so much worse then. And I swear to God, I didn’t know how old she was. We met on campus when I came to interview—I thought she was a college . . . Molly, I am so sorry.”