A tray of fruit and scones sat at the center of the kitchen table, along with a set of fine china dishes and cups on saucers, one cup half full, a faint lipstick stain on the rim.

“Will you eat?” she asked.

“Just coffee, please.”

We carried our coffee out to the table on the slate patio behind the kitchen. The mist had burned off. The grass was still long and green in the sunshine, but scattered with fallen leaves as the trees turned red and gold and yellow with the coming of fall. We sat down at the patio table and sipped our coffee, neither of us wishing to waste time with small talk but unsure what to say.

“I thought I might see you at the memorial service,” she said.

“I didn’t want to be a distraction.”

“I could have used one.”

“I’m sorry. To be honest, I didn’t think I could bear it.”

What couldn’t I bear? Listening to a naïve priest try to pin a happy ending on the tail end of a tragedy? Seeing all of those people I’d run away from once again? Being just another face in the crowd, somewhere in the back of the room, inauspicious, anonymous, unrecognizable?

“The news said something about a note,” I said. “What did it say?”

“He said he was sorry. He told me where to find him and that I should send someone else. That’s pretty much it.”

“There must have been something.”

“There is always something.”

“Enlighten me.”

Vanessa took in a long breath and let it out slowly. She pushed her hair behind her ears. I noticed her pearl earrings—the same, I assumed, as the ones she wore on the day of Arch’s first election. They had belonged to Arch’s grandmother. Heirloom jewelry. Who would wear them next? Dolly, no doubt. Things go on, as they must.

“Do you remember Sandy Hook?” she said.

“How could I forget?” When it happened, I was still in Iraq, where over the course of the war I had seen so much of man’s inhumanity to man that I had nearly lost the capacity for pity. There had been times when I’d heard or read of some fresh atrocity back home and observed the horror and indignation flowing forth on television. Only in the United States of America, I thought, does anyone still feel that such things are not as predictable as the sunrise. But none of the horrors I had witnessed could harden my heart against what had happened in that school.