I didn’t know what to say, but the keenness of her pain felt as sharp as my own. “When my father died, my mother wouldn’t let Claudia and me come to the hospital,” I said. “She told us that he’d been hurt, and she had to go to him. That was Christmas Eve. Claudia and I waited up for news, but she didn’t call. We fell asleep at some point, but in the morning she still wasn’t back.” I could remember it as clearly as if it had just happened. Claudia, at eleven, wasn’t quite a full-fledged rebel yet, and she went along with my idea that we couldn’t open our presents until our parents came home. My father had already shown me the bracelet, and I felt a secret thrill, knowing it was there under the tree. I think I convinced myself, and maybe my sister, that everything would be all right somehow if we waited.

“Your father was in an accident?” Renfrew asked.

“No. He was stabbed outside a bar.” It had taken me years to piece together what must have happened. He was out for a drink with some of his friends. Another man had come along and asked my father to come outside with him. The man had stabbed my father and left him bleeding on the street. My father was taken to the hospital but he’d lost too much blood too quickly.

“I’m so sorry, Lily. Did they ever find who did it?”

“Yes. He went to jail for a very long time.” It hadn’t made any sense to me when it happened. The man who was arrested—who apparently had confessed when the police picked him up—was the husband of one of my mother’s friends. My mother’s friend didn’t call or come by, and my mother wouldn’t discuss it. It was only when the friend showed up at the funeral, and my mother threw her out of the church, that the first inkling of what had happened hit me. I’d never told anyone, not even Jesse, and when my sister had asked me questions I’d batted her away like a fly.

Padma came back with the doctor, and Jesse, somehow sensing that there was news, sidled into the waiting room. “Tariq is out of surgery,” Padma smiled shyly. “But he is not—how did you put it?—out of the trees yet?”