“LET US PRAY,” the rabbi said. He began reciting the Twenty-third Psalm, and Robin mouthed the words, her father’s body in a coffin just a few feet away, the coffin she’d chosen based on some musing of Dad’s that she vaguely recalled. Something about being buried in a “plain pine box.” Though it could have been her mother who had said that. She wasn’t sure of anything anymore.

Getting ready for the funeral, Robin had downed a glass of wine to steady her nerves, and now her head felt light and woozy, her peripheral vision pierced by tiny, bright sparks. She hadn’t eaten today, and that, combined with the wine and the Xanax she’d taken earlier and forgotten about, was affecting her, that plus her own cartwheeling emotions—confusion and grief and anger and fear, so much fear for her mother. Please, please, Mom, please wake up . . .

Wake up and explain to me who you are.

“Are you all right?” Eric put an arm around her and she leaned into his shoulder and closed her eyes for a few moments, waiting for the feeling to pass, trying not to think of Eric texting furiously on a day off from work or the way he’d dropped his phone into his pocket when he realized she was behind him.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m fine.” So many things Robin couldn’t let herself look at, not if she was going to get through the rest of this day.

Robin opened her eyes. She turned her attention to the group surrounding her father’s grave, work colleagues of Dad’s whose faces looked vaguely familiar, a contingent from her office headed by Eileen, a few shell-shocked men and women she figured for Dad’s patients. Morasco was there too, standing in the back of the group with a tall, curly-haired woman Robin assumed was Brenna, his wife. There were a few people from Eric’s job whom Robin barely knew, a voluptuous young woman she recognized as Shawn Labatoir’s latest personal assistant. Some of her mother’s fellow hospital volunteers, her parents’ neighbor, Mr. Dougherty. And Nikki. Nikki was a sturdy-looking woman in a black T-shirt dress with sensibly cut silver hair; a weathered, makeup-free face; and blue eyes so bright they were difficult to look directly at. Before the ceremony started, she’d gone straight for Robin, hugged her tight enough to knock the wind out of her. “My God, Robbie,” she had said. “Little Robbie.”

“Umm . . . I’m not sure I—”