Eric smiled back at her. For a few careless moments, she felt like falling into his arms, just for the sake of being close to him, of feeling the warmth and strength and promise of his body. “I’m on your side, you know,” he said. “I’ll always be on your side.”

“Eric,” she said. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to live without her.”

“You don’t have to worry about that. She’s going to make it. I know it.” He looked straight into her eyes as he said it.

“You really believe that, don’t you?”

“I do.”

She knew he was telling the truth. Eric had always been like this, the very definition of blind optimism. In the past, she’d found it appealing—contagious too, the belief that anything was possible if you just willed it that way. But then Eric started working for sleazy Shawn Labatoir and changed in ways she wouldn’t have willed if she’d had that power. He started showing less of his new self to her and more of it at the office, on social media, wherever else he went to disappear. He worked longer hours and got raises and promotions, which bought them things he, not she, wanted: new furniture for the house, a renovated kitchen, dinners at New York’s finest restaurants. Robin didn’t care about any of that, and now she was the owner of an expensive home she spent a lot of time alone in; its only real value its proximity to her parents, one of whom was dead, the other so very close to it, for reasons she might never know and that, like everything else, she had no control over.

Robin took a breath. Enough. Eric put his beer down on the counter and took her hand in his. She didn’t pull away.

“Anybody show up at the house after I left?” she said.

“A few people.”

“Yeah?”

He nodded. “Michael from your office. Some lady who said she used to babysit you when you were a kid. A guy who said he was one of your dad’s colleagues, but seemed a lot more like a patient if you ask me—”

“A babysitter?”

“Yeah,” he said. “She didn’t stay long, but she left her card and said she’d love to catch up. It’s on the table.”

Robin spotted it and picked it up—a plain white card with black lettering. A name: Nicola Crane. A phone number. A P.O. box in Philadelphia.

Eric said, “You remember her? Nicola?”

“What does she look like?”

“Gray hair. Your mom’s age, maybe? About your height.”

“Very bright blue eyes?”

“Yeah.”

“Nikki. That’s how she introduced herself. And I got the impression she was a friend of my mom’s.”