Vanessa’s phone buzzed on the table. She picked it up, glanced at the screen, silenced it, and placed it facedown next to her coffee.

“I guess the treatment didn’t take,” I said.

“Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t,” she said. “Maybe Arch thought he was acting honorably, like one of those ancient Romans Walker Varnadoe tried to make you all worship back at Yeatman. I’m tired of being expected to excuse everything with illness.”

It didn’t seem a good time to note the irony of a powerful man secretly afflicted with depression shooting himself out of shame over voting down legislation designed to deter the mentally ill from having access to guns.

“I’d like to see the garden again,” I said. “Will you come with me?”

“It’s not much to look at anymore.”

“Just the same.”

“Okay.”

We followed the path leading around the house to the rose garden, its heirloom vines pruned and winterized, the leaves already yellowing, a few red scatterings of new growth coaxed out by the variations in temperature so typical of the change of seasons in Middle Tennessee, where summer seemed always to tease with the possibility of return before the first frost.

“I’m selling the house,” she said.

“I thought when I saw all of the furniture covered that you might be,” I said. “When does it go on the market?”

“It’s already under contract. I just have to sign some paperwork. Mother and Daddy have already come through to mark what they’d like to have. Jamie didn’t want anything except a share of the equity. I’m not keeping much myself. There’s no room for any of it where I’m living now. The closing is in a month, but I won’t need to be here.”

“You’re staying in Washington?”

“I’m with a nonprofit,” she said. “We raise money and lobby for women’s health care and education in the developing world.”

“That sounds like a noble calling.”

“It’s hard to feel sorry for yourself when you’re holding the hand of an Afghan woman who has had her nose and ears cut off for trying to escape slavery.”

“It’s good that you’re helping her.”

“She’s helped me far more. As have many others. Isn’t that always the case with people like us?”

“In my experience, people like us do more harm than good, despite our best intentions. But I understand what you mean.”

She stopped and faced me. A wistfulness came over her. How strange, I thought, to feel at once so close and so distant.

“Have you found someone yet?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Have you?”

“I have. A man I work with. We didn’t start seeing each other until Arch was gone, but the feelings began before. We’re keeping it under wraps for a while longer. But I thought you should know.”