Eric was around. He stayed home from work and talked to people on the phone, telling them, “She’s sleeping now. Can I have her call you back?” And, “I know she will appreciate that. Thank you.” He cooked Robin meals that she couldn’t bring herself to eat and sat by her side in intensive care as she held her mother’s cool, dry, mannequin hand. He put his arm around Robin’s shoulders and stroked her hair, and he asked her questions like, “What can I do?” and “How can I help?”

It made Robin feel guilty, all the attention her husband was paying her. She’d been longing for just a fraction of it over the past several months, wishing for it, really. And a part of her worried that she’d wished too hard, that she’d brought this on herself, on her family.

Had she?

She probably shouldn’t have been entertaining thoughts like these, sitting now in the bright of her kitchen, talking to the two detectives in charge of her parents’ case. Their names were Nick Morasco and Ehrlich Baus (“Pronounced Boss,” he had told her, as though she gave a damn) and while she really didn’t have anything against either one of these men—well, Morasco anyway; Baus was pretty annoying—her main goal was to get them out of her house as quickly as possible. Her father’s funeral was this afternoon.

Robin would have preferred not to be talking to them at all, not the way she was right now, with her head all jumbled from grief and worry and the remnants of last night’s sleeping pills and the Xanax she’d taken this morning. But at this point, she had no other choice. She’d been putting them off for so long, and, as Baus (“Boss”) had explained it to her, if they had to wait any longer to question her in full, it could hinder the investigation. You do want to find out who did this, don’t you? he had asked, and Robin could have sworn she detected a hint of suspicion in that smirk of his, those beady green eyes, like shards of glass. When she’d asked if Eric could stay in the room while she was questioned, he’d shaken his head as Morasco had said yes. Yeah, pretty annoying was putting it mildly.

Baus was smiling at her now. Smiling. Gulping the glass of lemonade that Eric had brought him and smiling pleasantly, like it was a church social in here and the square dancing was about to start. “Your husband makes an awesome glass of lemonade,” he said. Robin had no idea how to respond to that. She glanced at Eric.

“It’s . . . uh . . . a mix,” he said.

She turned to Morasco. “Did you look into the Femme Seven column?”