Eric . . . Robin thanked Eileen for her honesty anyway and hung up the phone, thinking again of the previous night. Her mother, so thin and frail, her whole face clenched up, as though she were trapped inside and trying to burst out. How shaken Robin had been—not so much by the swearing or even the talk of fire but by that strange, husky voice. Who are you, Mom? She’d returned to the bedroom to find Eric wide awake, sitting up in bed, waiting for her. They’d talked—or rather he had—about Renee, about everything she’d been through and how she’d lost the person she loved and depended on in a violent act and how therapy might be a good idea for her and how her physical body may be healed, but emotional scars last so much longer . . . Something like that. Robin couldn’t recall the exact words Eric had said because she hadn’t really been listening. The important thing had been the soothing tone of his voice, his arms around her. His being there. That had been what mattered.

Robin stared at her computer screen. She needed to get out of her own head, think of a column idea. She typed out a few sentences about the new Batman movie, deleted them, wrote a few more about a proposed Poseidon Adventure reboot, then deleted them too. She pulled the flowers closer to her, inhaled their lush scent and typed the only sentence that made sense: It’s hard for me to care that much about movies right now, when my own life seems to have lost its structure. Great. She was about to write a personal essay.

Her head was starting to throb. Robin grabbed her phone and purse and got up from her desk, moving past Michael and David mapping out a slide show on Jennifer Lopez’s marriages, past Jill on the phone with a pop music flack, begging for a phoner with some former Mouseketeer.

Once Robin made it outside the newsroom, she ducked into the small, empty hallway that led to the bathrooms and breathed in the quiet. It smelled of pine floor cleaner in there—a vaguely antiseptic scent that reminded her of the hospital. She called Eric, and he answered after one ring. “How are you holding up?” he said.

“Okay, I guess. Thank you for the flowers.”

“I wish I could take you to lunch.”

“But you can’t because Shawn will ruin your life.”

“Actually, I want to stick around so I can keep my eye on him,” he said. “I feel like the minute I let him out of my sight, he’s going to do a show about your parents.”

“You should stay then.”

Robin slid down the wall and sat on the floor. She had an urge to spend the rest of the day out here in this hallway, filing stories from her phone.

Eric said, “I talked to your mom today.”