This morning Debra and Joe showed up before the sun did, ready to prepare a full breakfast that I didn’t dare eat. My stomach clenched in painful knots, resisting anything that would sustain me. It was as if my body had already surrendered. By early afternoon a shift change as Cody arrived bringing alcohol and sympathy. No one wanted to speak the words that would surely break me—the police had found a body—or ask me the question I couldn’t bear to answer—did I think it was Vera? Only the dogs seemed to respect my self-indulgent torment as they hung back just enough to give me space, but close enough to offer fur-between-my-fingers comfort. Though Brutus, being an American Bully that we saved from a dog-fighting ring, had less fur and more slobber than the average breed and a tail shaped like a lightning bolt. He groaned as he rested his jowls and a string of saliva on my lap, like he understood my sadness. Dogs have a sixth sense, I’ve always believed.

I sipped my dinner of Kahlua and cream, wondering if Sydney and Eliot were keeping my in-laws awake. Oliver had sent the kids home with his parents to give me—meaning the kids—a reprieve. I was difficult to be around; I knew this. What mother wouldn’t be while waiting for autopsy results that determined if her daughter was dead? I had come out here on the porch to brood alone, until Cody joined me, sitting in the chair to my left and matching the rhythm of my back-and-forth rocking. A little later Oliver joined us, taking the rocker on my right. Apparently I needed constant supervision.

“Comfy, boys?” I huffed. The brothers made caveman-like grunts of contentment.

The sickly sweet scent of gutted pumpkins and decaying leaves hung in the air, chilly with the promise of winter. A couple of weeks after Vera had gone missing, Oliver had taken it upon himself to start a pumpkin patch for Eliot and Sydney—to distract them, he said, from all the crap. He threw himself into the project, renting a rototiller to break up a garden in the side yard and planting seedlings in mounds according to YouTube instructional videos. He enlisted the kids in the watering and fertilizing, and they took to the task with eagerness and pride.