Verity put a hand on her arm and gave it a quick squeeze—a gesture Robin might have found patronizing in the past. “Be with her,” the nurse said. “Hold her hand. Let her know you’ll be okay no matter what.”

“I don’t know that I will be okay . . .” Robin said. But Verity had already left the room.

Robin glanced at her watch. 10:00 A.M. On any other Monday at this time, she’d have been at a morning meeting at the Daily Culture office, listening to the reporters pitching ideas, taking notes as she thought about this week’s film column. Such a different world she used to live in four days ago.

She couldn’t remember whether or not she’d called in sick to work, couldn’t imagine herself ever returning. The thought of putting on something other than a T-shirt and yoga pants, of making up her face and getting on a train, of traveling that far from the hospital and talking and thinking about movies for God’s sake, about anything other than what was happening to her mother and why it was happening and who had done it to her . . .

Robin had forty-five minutes before she was supposed to meet Quentin Garrison in the cafeteria, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to speak to him anymore. She didn’t necessarily feel like hearing what he’d told her father. She didn’t know if she was strong enough for what he had to say.

She pulled a chair up next to the hospital bed. The room was curtained off, and on the other side of it, she could see the shadows of broad, dark-clad shoulders. Police guards. In case the killer came back to finish the job. Or, at least, that’s what she had assumed. Thinking about it now, with all these strange new fears in her mind, Robin wondered if they were out there to make sure her mother didn’t escape . . .

She took her mother’s hand in her own and gripped it tightly, hoping, as she always did, for the slightest squeeze back. Nothing.

Robin watched her face, so utterly still, the breathing tube taped to her lips—something Mom never would have stood for had she been aware, the way it infantilized her, like a bottle shoved into a baby’s mouth.

She listened to the sound of the ventilator, trying in her mind to liken the hollow whoosh of it to something other than what it was. Closing her eyes made it easier. Without the visual, the ventilator could be the sound of someone deep breathing while meditating, or the sound a seashell makes when you hold it up to your ear.

Of course, it isn’t the seashell that makes that sound—it’s your own blood, moving through your body. But there had been a time in Robin’s life when she hadn’t known things like that.