The thought of her triggered fresh grief. They’d found themselves rudderless in her absence; in the past, when anything had happened to one of them, Hannah had directed the efforts at celebration or consolation, relentlessly and sweetly hectoring everyone else until they rearranged their schedules to be able to do whatever was needed. Now they needed a Hannah to keep them informed about Hannah. Zadie had been trying to fill in, even though with four kids, a busy cardiology practice, and a congenital tendency toward dysfunction, she wasn’t an ideal successor as the group organizer. Georgia, who’d met Harry in San Diego several times now, kept them apprised of Hannah’s condition whenever Harry passed along information. She’d survived the worst of her illness, it seemed. Off the ventilator now for a few hours, she had to be awake enough to have asked about her baby. But neither Georgia nor Zadie had been able to reach Harry, and so no one knew Hannah’s current mental or physical state. The last they’d heard, the baby had not died.

Compton switched on a solitary lamp in the living room and tried to watch TV. She landed on a show about a bunch of flawlessly made-up women hurling insults at one another. Their giant glossy pink lips moved and moved, but they might as well have been hissing in that snake language from Harry Potter for all Compton could understand them. She stared blearily at the TV, too tired to lift her arm to turn it off.

Ellis had rarely watched TV, but having grown up in Toronto, he’d been an avid hockey fan. When the Maple Leafs played the Rangers, you couldn’t get him away from the television. He always made an occasion of it, doling out popcorn and juice to the kids, donning a Leafs jersey so ancient it had turned translucent. He’d sat right where Compton sat now, yelling urgent instructions to the players with his clean Canadian diction. Once he’d spilled an entire beer in his lap and hadn’t noticed.

She rubbed the nubby plaid arm of the chair, tears leaking from her eyes. Why was this fucking thing still here? It was, as her Kentucky grandmother would have said, ugly as sin. The rest of their furniture adhered to a minimalist Swedish-modern aesthetic imposed on them by a haughty design consultant at the furniture place, but this chair was a holdover from Ellis’s bachelor days. He’d fought to save it. Compton almost laughed, thinking of it now: having an argument over a young husband’s college man-chair was so clichéd it was practically an American marriage license requirement. But that’s what they’d done, and Ellis had emerged the victor. Compton had bitched about this chair almost every day of their marriage.