Noelle tried to avoid thinking about how soft Miriam’s hair would be to touch. “Your dad isn’t here. Your mom said he’s not coming,” she said, taking a guess at what Miriam was so wound up about.

Miriam’s entire body deflated into the stool. So Noelle had been right. What the hell had her father done to make her hold herself like prey hoping to go unnoticed by a predator at the hint of him?

Never mind. This woman was not her problem.

As if she’d been summoned, Ziva’s voice filtered into the kitchen. Miriam sighed, pushing off the stool, her shoulders slumped. Noelle followed her out to the dining room, curious against her better judgment.

Ziva Rosenstein-Blum swept into the nearly empty dining room in her athleisure clothes. Her hair was up in a high ponytail, perfectly straightened. Her yoga pants were designer. Her eyebrows were newly microbladed.

“Miriam,” Ziva said without preamble, “I stopped to get you a dress for the funeral, so you don’t have to rip up one of Hannah’s.”

Noelle noticed that Ziva and Miriam did not touch, and that neither mentioned Mr. Blum. She’d met him a couple of times, but he never deigned to notice her. He mocked Cass’s tendency to collect lost souls (never in front of Noelle, whom he considered The Help, but to Hannah, who told Noelle everything), calling Carrigan’s the Island of Misfit Toys. He spent all of his short visits looking itchy, as if the entire Adirondacks were an ill-tailored suit.

Mr. and Mrs. Matthews appeared from their apartments off the kitchen to embrace Ziva stiffly. Complicated though their relationship seemed to be with the Blums, it stretched back before Noelle had been born, a hundred thousand memories tying them together.

But she wouldn’t let Ziva, or Miriam, who had been gone for a decade, make her feel like an interloper. Everyone else might be happy to welcome the prodigal daughter back into the fold, but she had no happy memories of Miriam and no reason to make space for her. This place was hers. Ziva and Miriam would leave after the seven days of shiva while Noelle and Hannah would stay and try to get through their first Christmas without Cass, and everything would be…well, not normal, not ever again. But at least there wouldn’t be beautiful careless women in ugly sweaters asking her for cups of coffee.

Throughout the day, Rosensteins from around the country trickled in, along with families who had spent Christmas at Carrigan’s for years, sometimes generations. Cass Carrigan had been an eccentric aunt to uncounted lost souls in need of no-nonsense love.

She was buried in the closest Jewish cemetery in the middle of the drizzly afternoon. The crowd of mourners shuttled out in the big Carrigan’s van, and back again, clothes torn in grief.