Leda had had her teeth fixed, Sarah noticed. They looked a little too white but it was still a vast improvement. Sarah wondered if the group had paid for it. Maybe it was one of the ways they’d lured her. Sarah and Matthew had offered to get her teeth fixed after she’d been sober for a year, but Leda had decided to go to L.A. instead. How Leda’s teeth had looked when they’d found her that last time before she’d gotten clean: as though her mother had not made appointments and kept them; as though a mother had not diligently taken her daughter to a dentist and orthodontist until the daughter’s nearly perfect teeth were actually perfect, not so long ago. Leda, age thirteen, had terrible canker sores along her bottom lip; the sores were so bad that she’d cried daily. When Sarah asked the orthodontist what could be done, the orthodontist recommended that Leda toughen up, and Sarah lit into the orthodontist amid a waiting room full of people. She yelled, My daughter is in pain. Do you hear me? My daughter is in tremendous pain.

SHE PREHEATED THE OVEN and became inexplicably thirsty. Had those painkillers been the beginning? Sarah hated that question. She had asked it too many times to count. She had been told by myriad professionals that, no, she did not cause her daughter’s addiction. She could recall that orthodontist’s waiting room perfectly, though, and the recollection made her feel slightly sick. She gulped down water, prepared the fish, began sautéing bok choy. She scanned her memory for every conceivable point of contact, though none of them had been fruitful for at least two years. Her top three numbers: landline of a house out in Rockaway where Leda had lived with a boyfriend (and his senile grandmother) after barely graduating from high school; cell phone of the cold and intelligent sponsor from the first stint in rehab; cell phone of the roommate during the brief golden era following the second stint in rehab. Sarah had even met this roommate; she’d helped Leda move into the Ditmas Park apartment as if they were any normal mother and daughter. The day had been especially windy, and when Sarah had left the apartment and was nearly swept sideways, she remembered thinking how the weather itself was resetting the course of their lives, shoving pain and despair into the gutter along with the trampled ginkgoes and garbage.

When Matthew came into the kitchen, she said, “I want to call the numbers.”

“Can we just catch our breath?” He reached up across her and turned on the stove’s fan, turned it up as far as it could go.

“I have them written down.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said over the fan’s whirring. “We’ve had a streak of crazy. Or haven’t you noticed? Have you noticed?”