Emily set her wineglass on the floor. “Okay. Well, then,” she said, trying to collect herself. Becca would have been apoplectic if she’d witnessed this performance. Emily focused her attention on the mounds in the garage. “If it’s okay with you, I’ll take a few pictures. That will help us estimate how long it will take. And you’ll need to think about whether you really want to dump all of it. You don’t get a day-after do-over.”

“I’m not going to need one,” Quinn said firmly. “Now that I’m ready to deal with this, I want to be done with it.”

Emily assessed the pile. This would be eminently manageable, especially if Quinn really was committed to getting rid of everything. But Emily had been at this long enough to know that nothing turned out to be as simple as it seemed at first blush. She fired off four quick shots from outside the garage. She had only a limited view of what was there. Shoeboxes filled with CDs were within reaching distance. Stuffed animals—Care Bears, each a different pastel—were stuck in a cardboard liquor box on one of the bureaus.

“I see you still have your Care Bears,” Emily said. When they were kids, Emily and Becca had each had her own set. Months ago, Emily had laundered and sun-dried hers, then packed them in a box. Leaving them on her front steps for charity donation pickup, she’d felt as if she were abandoning beloved pets. She’d convinced herself that she had to part with her own sentimental clutter in order to start her new career. Now she was sorry she hadn’t at least kept her favorite, turquoise Wish Bear, with its belly badge a yellow shooting star.

“Care Bears are just the tip of the iceberg.” Quinn reached into the pile for a large brown Bloomingdale’s bag. She opened it and pulled out a hooded red T-shirt with BOSTON emblazoned in white letters down the sleeve. Emily recognized it as a BU Terriers basketball T-shirt.

“You went to BU?” Emily asked.

“I did,” Quinn said. “Undergrad.”

Frank and Emily had met at BU when they were in graduate school, she in education, he in law. He’d had a T-shirt just like the one that Quinn was holding up as Exhibit A of useless sentiment. Emily had slept in the shirt when she’d stayed at the apartment that Frank shared with Ryan, long before the pair had started their own law firm. The place had been a squalid firetrap, four flights up in the Fens. Emily wondered what had happened to the shirt.

Emily picked up her wineglass. She knew she shouldn’t have more to drink, but she wanted to swallow the bittersweet memory.