That idea—the idea that the school could go on, without her, that it could go on at all after everything she’d said—had not occurred to Marianne. She sat there dumbly, staring at the dregs of coffee sludge and sugar at the bottom of her cup.

“Okay,” he said, looking through his notes. “Tell me more about this … ugly bear list. Can you explain that again?”

She got another cup of coffee, dumped in three packets of sugar, loaded it up with milk. Cool coffee, Ruth had called it, when Marianne made it for her as a treat. It was something their mother made for Marianne.

Marianne felt the last wave of intoxication wash over her, then recede. She sat back down. She told him that the ugly bear list was her mother’s idea, inherited from her grandmother, a kind of private push-back against the forces of hypocrisy and false piety. She said she’d been depressed since her mother died—she didn’t know why she said that, but as soon as she said it, she knew it was true. How long ago was that? he wanted to know. A long time, she said, counting on her fingers under the table. Seventeen years.

“Wait,” Martin Rice said. “Wasn’t that what Muhammad Ali called Sonny Liston? ‘You big, ugly bear’—he was taunting him, you know, like he did. Ugly Bear Liston. Ugly bear list. Your mother or grandmother must have gotten it from the papers.” He sounded pleased, like Marianne had returned to him a pleasant memory, though he looked barely out of college.

“Oh,” said Marianne. “I didn’t—”

“Your mother—” He paged through his notes. “She was pro-life?”

Marianne took a deep breath, tried not to think about the knockout she wished she could deliver this kid, who didn’t seem to understand anything she’d told him. She forced herself to imagine that Ruth was listening, said that her mother’s life was complicated, and that she loved her children, and that her personal decisions were beside the point.

“Okay,” said Martin Rice. “I think I’ve got what I need.”

“But I haven’t told you about Janine,” Marianne said. “Her poetry, how I think it’s good. I haven’t told you—”

He turned off his recorder, closed his notebook, checked the time on his phone. “You’ve given me a lot,” he said. “I understand that you didn’t mean for things to go this way.”

“Wait,” she said as he stood. “How did you find out about us? Who gave you my email?”

“I can’t tell you that,” he said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.