Helen answers. She looks nearly as pale as the cream sweater she’s wearing over her rack-of-bones shoulders. I reach for her without saying a word, and we hug each other in the doorway.

“I’m so sorry,” I say. “So sorry.”

I feel Helen’s frail body crumple as she lets go. I know immediately she already knows what happened to Sophie, but I get the feeling that every time someone mentions how sorry they are or how much they loved Sophie, it will wound her with another bolt of pain. Concern will only underscore the hurt that’s taken over every grain of Sophie’s mother’s tortured being.

“Come in, Adam,” she says. “We’ve put Aubrey down, but she’s still awake.”

“She doesn’t know about her mom?” I ask.

Helen steps back and glances to the gleaming slate floor under our feet. “Frank told her,” she says. “He felt like she had a right to know.” She looks at me with an expression that mixes her own sorrow for her loss with a bitterness aimed at her husband. It’s classic. Frank Flynn is a grandstander. He needs to be the first and the loudest. The most memorable too. Many times he has been, but not for the reasons he’s assumed. He just had to beat me to my daughter. Had to get there first to tell her that her mother was dead.

“He was very gentle about it,” Helen goes on.

I don’t want to cause a scene. I refuse to turn the worst moments of my life into the beginning of a war. I almost laugh at that: the war began long before Sophie and I were married. I’ve tried with little success to ignore it. Frank wanted his girls all to himself: first Helen, then Sophie, and later Aubrey. I was the asteroid that hovered just outside his orbit. Out there, but not really there. If there at all, only once in a great while.

Frank’s in the living room sitting next to an air purifier, at which he aims his omnipresent cigar smoke. It’s pointless. Like the Buick, the house reeks of his cigars. I wonder how Helen can tolerate it.

Or if she even notices anymore.

“We lost our Sophie,” he says as I approach.

“Lost her,” I say, holding the phrase in the thick air and wondering why he’s treating her death as if she’s on some random carousel at baggage claim. She’s been raped. Murdered. She’s in a refrigerator in a county morgue.

“My little girl,” Frank goes on. “What in the world are we going to do now?” He looks at me but directs his words at his wife. I am nothing. Just like always.

“We have plans to make, Frank,” she says.

An inch-long ash threatens to fall, and he finally stubs out his cigar. “We will never make plans again. What’s the point? Why bother? What am I going to do now with this life? Make plans to do things with you?”

“I didn’t mean that,” Helen says. “I meant funeral plans.”