Colleen had been late, arriving only two hours before the funeral; a late season snowstorm had socked the Northeast and canceled most flights. When she landed, there was no one to pick her up so she’d called a cab and told the driver to take her directly to the church where the funeral service was being held, the same one where she’d once expected to be married. She’d texted Shane. I’ll meet you at St. Paul’s. Keep Hallie away from me.

“Lena,” her brother had phoned to say in a whisper, Hallie obviously near. “You can’t avoid her. It’s our mother’s funeral.”

“I can. I will. I’m here for Mother, and for Dad. And of course for you. But not her. Not Hallie.”

“She wants to talk to you.”

“No.” Colleen had closed her eyes so tightly that bright confetti burst in the darkness.

Somehow she’d managed to avoid her sister for a full two days, during the house visits, funeral and burial. Of course she’d glimpsed Hallie across the room with Walter, who kept her welded to his side, protective or possessive, who could say?

During this time, remembered arguments between Colleen and her mother had come to mind, one after the other in unrelenting succession, causing Colleen to feel both sick and nostalgic. Regret, that was what death brought in its disorienting wake. Why hadn’t she been closer to her mother? Why hadn’t her mother been closer to her? Why had they argued about everything from how she fixed her curly hair to her decision to become a writer? Why did they argue more than Hallie and Mother? Death, she realized, also brought a litany of why why why, like a whining child.

Colleen had finally stopped the never-ending reel of questions. That was part of life’s abrupt ending—there would never be answers. Nothing would be resolved.

There had been loving moments together, of course there had been. When Colleen’s mother had rubbed her back as she coughed with the flu, when she’d kissed Colleen good night and brushed her hair off her forehead—little moments that added up to a quiet conviction that there was love present and available. Yet there was also always the quieter conviction that Mother loved the others better, that Hallie was the favorite Donohue daughter. Dad would adamantly deny this accusation and then collect Colleen in his arms and spin her around, saying, “Who wouldn’t love everything you are?”

Colleen still didn’t like to think about the day of the funeral. The deep sorrow pressing on her, the knowledge that whatever she felt she was missing from her mother she would never know or have, the weight of who they all used to be and would never be again: a complete family.