Robin shoved the thought away. She pushed the shovel into the dirt, feeling as though she were moving through water, the lack of her father all around her, the gasp of her mother’s ventilator running through her head. The shovel was heavy as she lifted it, and the clump of dirt hit the coffin with a soft, crumbling sound. She wanted to cry, but she couldn’t, not with all these eyes on her. Not standing next to the Bar Mitzvah Boy. It was easier to keep her head down, her breath even, to focus not on feelings but on what she had to do: hand the shovel to the rabbi, turn around and walk back to her husband, one foot in front of the other, eyes aimed at the ground, at her open-toed shoes. Her chipped pedicure. Don’t think. Just do.

As she walked, though, Robin found herself remembering again the last phone conversation she’d ever had with Dad—the strange, sad sound of his voice. Yes, he frequently got sad over the Yankees losing. But this had been different and Robin had known it, deep down. Have we been good parents to you? Over forty-one years of her life and hundreds of poorly played games, he’d never asked her that question before.

Something had been wrong. Robin had known it at the time. Some part of her had. Yet it had been easier to just believe the lie, the way she always believed the lies her father told her, about everything being okay when it wasn’t, about how he and Mom had only been engaged in a discussion, during those few times they’d woken her up late at night with their harsh, hissed words. About how mama’s baby bird had flown off to join her flock or how seventh-grade parent-teacher conferences had gone just fine, when Robin later wound up flunking math that year, how her eighth-grade perm made her look like a movie star or how the bottomless sorrow she felt sophomore year of high school was nothing serious at all—just teen angst. Everybody has that. It had been Robin’s mother, with her lack of a medical degree, who had finally taken her to a therapist.

For a person whose job it had been to plumb the depths of criminals’ brains in search of the ugly truth, Robin’s father had been awfully comfortable telling little white lies. And Robin had made herself fall for them, every time. It was easier, wasn’t it, to pretend that things weren’t as bad as they seemed?

Some of the guests were lining up now, waiting for their turns to shovel dirt onto Dr. Mitchell Bloom’s grave. The others in the group were starting to disperse. She saw Nick and Brenna Morasco heading away from the group and hurried to catch up with them, brushing past some outstretched hands as she did. “Detective Morasco?”