“Tell you later. Did you hear from Zachary?”

“No.”

“How is Sarina?”

He nodded toward the living room. “Not good. The reality of what’s happened has finally hit, and hit hard. I found her sitting on the floor in a corner clutching the baby, who was yelling her head off, poor little thing. Anna took Sarah to her house.”

He led Hannah to Sarina, who was curled up, her knees to her chest, in a corner of the living room couch. The young woman lifted a tear-stained face, then dropped her head onto her knees.

“I want to die, I want to die,” Sarina said between moans.

Hannah sat with her and stroked her hair. “My dear child. There have been times in my life when I thought I would never recover from a loss. Long ago, I loved a man with all my heart, and he was killed in a senseless boating accident. It broke my heart. I wanted to die.”

Sarina lifted her head. Her voice was strained and raspy from crying. She placed a hand over her heart. “What will make this terrible pain go away? Tell me, Hannah? What shall I do? What did you do?”

Max slipped from the room. Through the living room window Hannah watched him take the steps two at a time and disappear across the lawn. She could see the hummingbird feeding station that hung on the porch, see the birds whizzing up to it, sticking their long bills in to extract the sweet liquid, then whizzing away. She closed her eyes for a minute, remembering Dan, then gave her full attention to Sarina.

“One day, the pain was so enormous that I thought I’d break apart. I got into my car and drove to the lake where he had been killed, where he and I had been so often. I stood at the water’s edge. I remember thinking, What is that noise? Who’s screaming like that? The pain gushed up from the deepest pit of my belly and the sounds I made didn’t sound human, and I didn’t try to stop them.”

Sarina stared at Hannah, her eyes wide, disbelieving. “You did that?”

Hannah smoothed the hair from Sarina’s face. “Yes, my dear child, I did that. Too often we want to scream our pain and we feel we can’t.”

“And it made you feel better to do that?”

“It made it better. It was like breaking a pot and letting the contents, the pain, spill out. I’m not saying that was the end of it. Even today when I think about him, it hurts a little. That day, I sat on the ground and talked to him. I told him how angry I was that he had died and left me. I cursed him for my loneliness and misery. I used language that I would consider unbecoming and would never use in my everyday life.”