A half hour later, Courtney’s mother, Vera, returned from shopping and chauffeuring her youngest, Brian, to soccer, and her middle, Jessica, to dance team. Anne noticed Vera had a tough time coming into the bedroom right away, and so she kissed Courtney on her forehead and came down the hall to the kitchen. Like anyone stuck in the full undertow of grief, Vera was exhausted. Anne felt awful for her, and from a cruel, disconsolate part of her mind she heard: You can’t let a girl run off like that, she was too young. She wasn’t trying to think like that, but she couldn’t help herself. Now she stood there listening to Vera go on about the doctors and what her husband, Raymond, thought, and the whole time feeling worse and worse for being judgmental. Christ, how as a parent could you forgive yourself? But she smiled and hugged Vera, and they walked out of the house together to the curb and Anne’s car, and smiled and hugged again. Vera was lost in it, and in a different way, so was Anne. How can anyone handle any of this? She was relieved to close the silver door to her Mercury Zephyr but felt a terrible despair for what was ostensibly a good deed. Mysterious ways, Anne mulled, and then realized that wasn’t even a line from the Bible. She needed to clear her head. It was a quarter to five, and she was just down the street from St. Monica’s. If she hurried, she could make evening Mass.

St. Monica’s had a much prettier church than the Malones’ parish, St. Rita’s, which had the feel of a converted gym. St. Monica’s was a version of Texas midcentury modern that actually worked: built in the round with white plaster archways and floor-to-ceiling stained glass and a rose window raised to an oculus above a mosaic altar tessellated with a pale pink Ascension. A minute before five, Anne settled into a back pew on the far left of the altar near the organ and knelt to pray.

Growing up in Sts. Peter and Paul Parish in the South Bronx, Anne had her faith inculcated in the normal severe and thetic manner. And while bridled by uncertainty—and a suspicion she was overlooked and underestimated—she became a novice with the Sisters of Charity after graduating from Cathedral High School. Her mother, Mary, was pleased and proud, but her father, Billy Mulligan, wanting grandsons, brooded with dissent.