Robin managed a nod. Today’s column. Well, yesterday’s at this point. She moved away from the desk, took a seat against the wall, a few chairs down from the wailing toddler. She felt her phone buzz in her back pocket—a text. Eric. Something stirred within her, the tiniest spark of hope. She pulled the phone out of her back pocket, looked at the text. It was from an unfamiliar number:

Choke on your piece-of-shit column and die.

Robin closed her eyes. Speaking of haters.

And then she put her head down and started to cry, tears spilling down her face, shoulders heaving. She cried as though she were alone in the room, alone in the world, her sobs rivaling those of the toddler. She was beyond caring or thinking about anything, not the teenagers whispering in the row of chairs across the room, not that bright-faced young nurse standing over her, asking, “Are you all right, Ms. Diamond?” She cried until she felt arms around her, warm and familiar—an answer to a prayer she’d never been aware of.

The arms of her husband. His voice in her ear. “Oh my God, Robin. Oh my God.”

You’re here, she wanted to say. But she couldn’t speak.

Eric held her until her sobs subsided, all the tears drained out of her, her head on his shoulder.

“How did you find out?” she said, finally.

“Mr. Dougherty told me.”

“Oh.”

“They’ll be fine. Your parents are strong and healthy. Your mom’s barely into her sixties. And your dad. Come on, he’s a bull. He can still beat me at arm wrestling.”

“I hope so.”

“I swear, honey, they’ll be okay. And the police will get whoever did this to them.”

Robin said nothing. She wanted to believe Eric. Just like she wanted to believe that all her suspicions about him were unfounded, that he really was just working late over the past couple of months, that he might have been taking his job too seriously but not as seriously as her, as their love, their future, the things they cared about.

“You should have called me, Robin,” he said. “I’d have been here sooner.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“I got home and you weren’t there and I thought . . .” His voice trailed off.

“What?”

“I thought you’d left me.” She turned and looked at him, the beard scruff, dark circles under the bright blue eyes, the concern in them . . . She inhaled his cologne, but she didn’t ask herself why he’d put on cologne to meet a source. She asked nothing, felt nothing, other than a yearning to know him again. “I would never leave you,” she said. And in that moment, she meant it.

“ROBIN.”