In those days before cell phones and e-mail, she hadn’t been able to access him or ask if he’d received her letters. He was as far off as Jupiter, with its unreachable surface and toxic gas. She’d been blocked at every turn; his mother and the school had told her Nick had decided to stay in Costa Rica, and yes, they would tell him to contact her. He never did.

When she married Phil, she entombed those questions behind a solid wall. Seeing and touching Nick Lowry now was like a sledgehammer pounding on the crumbling mortar of that very wall, and the questions tumbled out.

She finally rose from bed after giving Molly and Phil time to leave the neighborhood, to let Molly notice she’d forgotten something at home and come back to retrieve it: a book report, her tennis racquet. She sat on the side of the bed and hung over her knees, groaned at her fatigue. She wanted to return to a week ago when none of this was anywhere near the surface of her life, of her thoughts. She rose to go to the kitchen. Coffee, she needed coffee.

A luminous day poured through the window over the kitchen sink. Amy moved to close the blinds, but her hand hung in the air as she watched a red-breasted robin grab a sunflower seed from the wooden bird feeder that Molly had made in fourth grade at a Home Depot workshop with her dad. Molly had proudly brought it home, and she and Amy had painted it bright apple green and blue to match the kitchen. They’d gone outside together and hung it in front of the sink’s window. For eight years now, Amy had started the morning by watching which bird came to visit.

At this memory of Molly, Amy felt tenderness akin to what she had felt when leaning over her babies’ cribs, knowing there was nothing she could do to force them to continue to breathe in and out. She could not start or stop what life brought to her, including Nick Lowry.

Exhaustion lay behind her eyes as a burned patch of sleeplessness. She turned to the counter and knocked her favorite brown pottery mug on its side next to a full, hot coffeepot.

“Oh, Phil. You’re so sweet.” She spoke out loud and lifted the front page of the Darby Chronicle that he’d left for her.

She filled her mug just as the phone rang, startling her. She fumbled with the pot and coffee spattered on the counter, on her white cotton nightshirt.

“Damn.” She was shaky, unsure, and she hated it. She grabbed a kitchen towel and the phone at the same time.

“Hello.” She wiped at the spilled coffee, preoccupied.

“Amy? It’s me, Eliza.”

Amy was wordless.

“Amy, are you there?” Eliza spoke with soft, drawn-out syllables that reminded Amy of the way one would talk to a stranger’s child.