In Florida, as they’d driven back to the airport, after Tess had initiated both the rental and the transfer of the deed of the house, she had thought but hadn’t said to Martin that maybe they were losing not just Helen but this whole state that she had come to love, even as they’d all disparaged it all these years: the flatness and the scrub trees; the lushness still for stretches; coco plums, hydrangeas, azaleas, allamandas, bougainvilleas—none of which Tess would have known to name before Helen was hers; the long blocks of concrete pastels on U.S. 1; the way the heat felt wet but also not as bad as it did in New York because they had the sea breeze; the trips to the beach always, after dinner, everybody up late swimming, the water almost always warm; the way the salt stuck to her skin. All those years telling Helen to just let it go, to come be with them, and then Tess feeling, too, like she wasn’t ready: how strange it was, to think of a place she’d never been for more than a few weeks as a thing that she had lost.

Grief was new to Tess, still foreign. She knew what it was to live with lack—had built a whole life knowing well enough not to depend on other people—but she hadn’t ever lost someone who’d given her so much. Sometimes on the train, a run, walking to the apartment, she gets teary, thinking about Helen, about whatever she might have said when next she left a message on Tess’s phone. Just as likely about politics as palaver about a plant that she was growing, just as likely that she had talked to Martin and thought Colin needed to change teachers, thought maybe she could help. She thinks of all those times Helen had flown up to New York for a few days, putting the ticket on a credit card that often, later, Tess and Martin would pay off: taking the children for a few hours on the weekend, baking with them, making all the dinners, Tess relieved and easy on the couch.

She realizes now that living with lack does not prepare you for loss. Lack is an amorphous murk, difficult, unpleasant, but loss weighs more, has a shape and texture all its own.

She knows she should be nice to Kate, who loved Helen more than anybody, who talked to her every day. Tess thinks now that she needs to talk to Kate, to help her, but she feels so much less capable now that Helen isn’t here.