She drops her hands away from her eyes, and she is smiling. “Thank you,” she says, and she composes herself and encourages us to get some good sleep for a safe drive back in the morning but hopes we’ll consider eating at her favorite diner, where the pie is outstanding. “Oh, and Robert? I think you might have an angel in my Nick. He’ll be sitting on your shoulder, keeping an eye on you for the rest of your life.”

I shiver. “Good night, Naomi.”

•  •  •

We check into two rooms at a twee bed and breakfast, but Jonah joins me and Lizzie in our room for Toblerone and half of Con Air on TV before disappearing across the hall. We all need rest, to hit reset so we can extricate ourselves from a web of mourners—so many people with quiet lives, picking our brains and sharing exclusive parts of themselves, deciding we qualify for inclusion simply by virtue of having known the permanently Excluded. They’ve left us drained to the bone, marrow-dry.

Sleep sweeps into the room, but before it can take me, I remember what I meant to ask Elizabeth. “Did you know Jonah is an English major?”

“Mm-hm,” she moans, sleep-thick. “Good night.”

I wrap my limbs around her curled-up body—the little spoon to my Big Dipper. Me: Ursa Major. The Great Bear. Elizabeth’s hair smells like an ashtray, thanks to the smokers on Naomi Miller’s porch, but this doesn’t stop me from burying my face in her neck and breathing myself to sleep.

Naomi

Sorry has begun to change. The shape of the word—the word itself—feels slippery and gross. There’s nothing firm about sorry. It’s oily or something. Soapy. People keep throwing it at me, but I feel nothing. Soap bubbles out of their mouths that pop in the air, and then there’s nothing but air and soap film.

Are they giving me permission to blame them for having families while mine returns to the cosmic chopping block? Do they feel like they did something wrong? Did they do something wrong? Is my nightmare their fault?

No. They’re not that powerful. If they were, they’d be gods, and everyone keeps telling me God has a plan, so is this my sorry friends’ plan? Of course not. It’s just a convenient time to get religion—to concede power to the mass of dark matter at the center of our universe. The Great Unknown. The big black hole that keeps sucking up everyone I love, that keeps sucking and sucking all the love from my life without any reason or plan.

“Naomi,” says my old friend Mia, “tell me what I can do to help.” She’s fluffing pillows so she can feel useful, so she can feel better about herself.

“Not a thing,” I say. “Really.”