“It’s a good idea, but you know I can’t tell your stories the way you’d tell them,” I say. “But I am curious: how are you liking the new house and the new job?”

To our collective shock, at some point after Ellis died, Compton sold her apartment in the city and bought an honest-to-God farmhouse outside a small town in Litchfield County, Connecticut. I could no more picture Compton living in a farmhouse than I could picture the Duchess of Cambridge living in a rusty-roofed shack with a potbellied stove affixed to its sagging front porch. Perhaps to ward off any suspicion she might be delusional, Compton had sent us tons of photographs of her new place, revealing a battered white clapboard two-story house with a pitched roof and a latticed porch, plopped in the middle of a ridiculously bucolic field. Behind the house, the field stretched all the way to the gentle swell of the Taconic Mountains, visible this time of year as a brownish-blue smudge against the horizon.

The house wasn’t the only change. Instead of applying for a job in the emergency department of the closest medical center, Compton had accepted a position with an insurance company, working from home to analyze charts. This, she’d explained, would allow her more time to be with the children and engage in a variety of wholesome non-Comptonish domesticities, such as baking and vegetable tending and sewing.

“Sewing?” Emma had exploded on one of our weekly Zooms after hearing this news. “Com, you don’t know how to sew.”

“I sew people,” Compton pointed out, a little archly. “I don’t see how hard it could be to sew inanimate fabric. At least a piece of cloth isn’t going to try to bite me while I’m fixing it up.”

“I tried to sew an outfit for Delaney once,” said Zadie. “There was quite a bit of math involved.”

“I’m good at math.”

“Are you going to wear whatever you sew?” Vani herself wore an expression of alarm, clearly unable to picture Compton in anything other than scrubs or a tailored Max Mara frock.

Compton narrowed her eyes. “You guys. I’m not going to sew my own wardrobe. I was thinking a tablecloth or something.”

“Still . . .”

Now, in Atlanta, a pensive look crosses Compton’s face at the query about her new circumstances. “The kids have adapted. I worried Lawrence would kick up a fuss—he’s a city kid. He likes museums and shows, and he had a best friend, Hamid, he wouldn’t want to leave, and a school he loved. But he didn’t react at all like I thought he would. He was very subdued.”

“Was he depressed?” Hannah asks quietly.