“If not more so,” said Glenda Sedge. “There’s the next publicity drive. There’s the blog. There are events coming up.”

They were both having trouble meeting my eye, whether out of respect for my silence or because I unnerved them. Jack leaned forward, his forearms resting on his parted knees, hands loosely linked between them. There was a new authority in the way he sat, and in the man’s watch he wore low on his wrist.

After the vomiting incident, I’d had to tell Jack that Maddy couldn’t see him anymore. Couldn’t, I stressed, not didn’t want to. There was no point in being as blunt as she was. It was too awful for them both, she said. What boy in his right mind wanted to be around this? She would send him away before he decided to stop coming. He would thank her one day.

But Jack did not give up easily. The doorbell rang and he faced me on the porch, hands thrust in his pockets, head at an awkward angle, lips set in a grimace to fend off tears.

“Maddy’s sleeping a lot,” I told him gently. “She’s asleep now.”

“Can I come back when she wakes up?”

“Next time,” I said.

“Tomorrow?”

“Another time.”

He turned up again the following day, and again I told him Maddy was asleep. The third time, with a stubborn jut of his chin, he asked if he could come in. I took him to the study. We sat together in our mutual and solitary despair. A few feet away, on the other side of the stairs, Maddy was dozing. I had no right to go against her wishes. His gaze flitted across my shelves and filing cabinets, the alarming stacks of paper on desk and floor that I was unable to put in order or care about. I don’t think Jack had ever been in my study. They’d spent their time in Maddy’s room or the den.

He was swallowing and blinking rapidly. This boy had loved her body, championed her art, kept her company in illness and relative health. She would haunt him for years to come. The fear on his face was my fear. I longed to seize Jack and hold him to me and be held, even as I fortified myself against him. I stood up, trembling.

“Do you want to see her?”

Dumbly he followed me to the dining room. Maddy was lying on her side, facing away from us. Her body hardly raised the covers. Now that treatments had stopped, her head on the pillow had new growth of soft furry brown, making it look even more tenderly skull-shaped.

“I’ll be in the kitchen.”

I never knew whether Jack woke Maddy up, or if he just sat watching her sleep. He appeared sometime later in the kitchen, completely dazed, thanked me, gave me a blind wordless hug, and rushed out.