Dinner was done, bowls had been cleared. The soup hadn’t been terrible. Cricket had bought a baguette, of which I ate most, slathered in butter. Good bread can soothe the nerves. And I didn’t want my voice to shake. I’d been thinking so much about the sentences, the individual words I would use. I didn’t want a single one to tremble. The people reading wouldn’t hear my voice, but Atlas would. I would.

Wallis and Cricket had gone out to a movie—animated, family, they wanted something light—and now I sat on Cricket’s couch, Atlas in the chair across from me. He’d drawn it forward, moving the coffee table aside, and our knees almost touched.

“Daisy Catherine Richardson,” I said.

“Catherine?” He tilted his head. Had I really never told him?

“Cricket,” I said.

“Of course. Duh.”

I laughed. I’d never heard him use that word. “You even managed the valley girl accent. A true Renaissance man.”

“And your astrological sign, please?” He continued to scrawl in his spiral notebook, acting the proper reporter.

“Cancer.” I gestured to my body—the hard, external shell of the crab. “Obviously.”

“That’s right. June 25. Coming up in a couple weeks. We’ll have to celebrate,” he said. “Next. If heaven existed, who would you want to meet first and what question would you ask them?”

I bit back a grin. He was disarming me, making me comfortable, and I loved him for it. “So much for the easy questions.”

“An answer, please.” He flipped some notebook pages back and forth industriously. “We’re all business here.”

I considered. “Eleanor Roosevelt. I’d ask, well, I’d ask if I could be her friend.”

Then Atlas was himself again, kind and studious, and I knew the game was over. “And your father? What would you say to him in heaven?”

“If it existed.” This was a throwback to one of the early conversations we’d had, more than a decade ago, about religion and God and our separate dabblings with Buddhism in college, in a shabby hotel bar—somewhere outside Norfolk, after a visit to a peanut farm—drinking bad cabernet until the bartender started mopping under our stools.

“Purely hypothetical,” Atlas agreed. His gaze drifted from his notebook to me, his eyes seeming to melt, and I knew he was also remembering.

“How much time do we have?” I asked.