But he did. He talked about fundraisers for special camps serving unfortunate teens. He sold himself as a literal charity case, dark and brooding, but all along, his home base had windows in every room and calico curtains on every window and flowering crabs behind every curtain. His history was dreadful, but he lived it in a sunlit box that smells like butter and brown sugar and mountain air, with an aunt who displays photos of him in silver frames. He was on the swim team. He had friends. I say, “He told us he was homeless this summer.”

“He said he hadn’t made plans,” Elizabeth reminds me. “He didn’t say there was no home on the planet where he could go. Besides, this was only home for a few years. He moved here from Ohio, and now his bedroom is Naomi’s craft room. I can’t blame him for wanting to hang out with Jonah rather than sleep next to pipe cleaners and mosaic tiles.”

“How did you know that, about his bedroom?”

“Nick told me. Come on. Let’s get the mingling over with.”

I cringe at her acknowledgment of pillow talk with Nick, but stuff it away as we wait in single file for our turn to fill porcelain cups with bitter coffee from an industrial-sized carafe, probably borrowed from a church or rec center or Rent-A-Center. We link ourselves to a chain of people who apologize too much, who say, “I’m sorry, you first,” every time they reach for the same thing as someone on the opposite side of this narrow buffet. We load our plastic dessert plates with cheese cubes, finger sandwiches, sugar cookies, and peanut butter balls. We fall in line.

“It doesn’t make sense,” someone says, because that’s all anyone can say, as though being alive is easier to understand than life ceasing to exist.

He was doing so well.

He must have been suffering so quietly.

Was he seeing anyone? Was he sick?

A man’s booming voice rises from the crowd to say, “That guy would know.”

I should walk directly to the porch where all those old, deaf people wouldn’t bother me, but curiosity gets the better of me, and I look, and yes, the big man in the corner—big like Navy SEAL, not Santa Claus—is pointing to me. I saw him earlier, mingling with a few boys around Jonah’s age. Not quite old enough to be their father, not young enough to be one of them.

“You’re a doctor, right?” the man asks. “Wasn’t Nick staying with you?”

Balancing a plate full of finger food with one hand, I raise the coffee cup in my other hand as salutation. “That’s correct,” I say. “Nick was our guest. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“What’s your name again?”