After Ezra left for work, Emily asked Ari to come over, and then pulled her dog-eared copy of The Red Tent from the drawer in her nightstand. It had been traveling with her for years, from nightstand to nightstand. As the book she had read to her mother in the months before she died, it felt like the last thread attaching her to her mom. Emily’d ended up finishing the last chapters on her own, the week after her mother’s funeral. But somehow there was still comfort in the book, comfort in how it connected her to her mother, in how it connected her to a time when her mother was alive, when the pressure of her hand on Emily’s arm meant so much.

Emily read, lost in another world, not thinking about her own, until Ari arrived and let herself in.

“Em?” she called.

“In here,” Emily said. She folded down the page she was on and put the book on the bed next to her as Ari walked into the room. When the two sisters saw each other, their eyes filled with tears.

Ari slipped off her jacket and shoes and climbed into the bed next to Emily, both of them on their backs, looking up at the ceiling. Ari slid her fingers into Emily’s, and the sisters held hands, the way they had each night for a week after their mom had died, not letting go until they’d both fallen asleep and their hands unclasped in their dreams.

“You’re okay,” Ari said. Not a question, a statement.

“I feel like this is my punishment,” Emily whispered, the thought that kept circling round and round in her mind. “For what happened in college.”

Ari squeezed her hand. “Do you really believe that?”

Emily thought for a moment. “Intellectually, no,” she said. “But I still feel that way. Otherwise why would this happen to me now? What if . . . what if it really was Mom’s soul and then I was an idiot and it was my fault that . . .”

Ari turned toward her sister. “Em, you’ve gotta forget I ever said that. I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t even really believe it then. I don’t know why I thought it, why I said it. It was dumb.”

“But maybe it was true. And that’s why—”

“It’s not true,” Ari said, interrupting her sister. “And even if it were, it wouldn’t have anything to do with what happened now. I looked it up last night. Twenty-five percent of all recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage. And the WHO website said two hundred thirteen million women get pregnant each year. So think about it, that’s more than fifty-three million miscarriages.” She paused. “In one year.”