Mom always taking in strays. Dad always making her take them back . . . “Mom,” Robin whispered, her voice small and alone in the darkened room. “Mom. Don’t go. I need you more than Dad does now. Don’t listen to him. Don’t do what he says for once. Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me.”

And then she was sobbing. How fast that had happened, that shift from the brink of sleep to this—Robin bent in two, clasping her knees, her throat aching, all the breath knocked out of her. This is the way grief is. This is the way it’s always going to be. It lies in wait and then it pounces and there’s nothing you can do. There will never be anything you can do to make it better . . .

She reached for the bottle of sleeping pills on her nightstand, dropped two of them into her mouth, choked them down without water. She ran a hand across her wet face and waited for sleep to take her out, thinking again of that young babysitter—a teenage girl. Her mother’s last stray. She can take care of Robbie, Mitchell. She loves Robbie so much. Her mother’s arms around the girl’s shoulders. And how old had Robin been? Around eight or nine. The girl had called herself CoCo and she’d played Barbies with Robin and let her watch MTV and she’d let her comb her hair. Such long, pretty blond hair and blue eyes. Bright blue eyes. CoCo. Nicola. Oh, how you’ve changed . . . “Mom,” Robin whispered into her arm as she drifted off to sleep. “Your stray has come back.”

ONE SUMMER NIGHT, when she was ten years old, Robin woke up thinking that someone was breaking into her house. She’d heard the floorboards creaking when she was still half asleep, and she tried telling herself—as her parents had always told her when she was little and frightened by noises in the middle of the night—that it was just the old house settling. But then there had been a crash downstairs, and Robin had sat up in bed, too frightened to scream. After a few moments, she’d heard the squeak of the back door opening.

Robin had sneaked out of bed and peered out her window. She saw it right away: the shadow of a man, turned away from the house, facing the hedges on the far side of the garden. A shadow that, even from the upstairs window and in such a terrified state, she had recognized as her father.

Robin had put her sneakers on. She’d hurried downstairs and into the backyard, just as he was putting out a cigarette. The shiny red ashtray cupped in his hand, his cheeks flushed, even in the dim garden lights. Dad. Smoking.

Don’t tell Mom, he had said, finger to his lips.