She kept a photo of her father on her desk. When she picked it up, she could hear his cold voice in her head, passionless and demanding. The photo showed him in his physics lab at UC Berkeley, in his white lab coat. Like her, he was tall and thin. He had wiry gray hair and a neat mustache. He didn’t smile, and his eyes were impatient. Her father never liked to bother with emotional frills like photographs. When Frankie took the picture with her phone, he’d said, “Get on with it, get on with it.”

Her mother had died of cancer when Frankie was five, just a year after her sister, Pam, was born. Since then, their family had been just the three of them. Marvin Stein, physicist, was not meant to be a single father. He dealt with numbers, theories, and formulas, not children. And definitely not girls.

It was hard enough when they were young, but it got worse during high school and college. Their father demanded perfection. Anything but straight As and top test scores was a failure. Because he was a success himself, he pushed his daughters to do more and achieve more. Nothing was ever good enough. Frankie responded by setting crazy expectations for herself that might win his praise. Pam responded by defying him altogether and throwing her failures in his face.

And now he was gone. More than three months later, he still haunted her.

“Are you thinking about Marvin again?” Jason asked.

Her husband stood in the doorway of her office. He was dressed in running clothes, and his hands were on his hips. Sweat glowed on his narrow face.

“Yes, I keep thinking about that last camping trip,” she said, toying with the photograph of her father with her fingertips.

“Dwelling on it won’t change what happened,” Jason told her.

“Oh, I know.”

Jason sat in the comfortable chair in front of her desk. He worked in the headquarters of a large pharmaceutical company a few blocks away on Post Street, but he often went running through the city midway through the afternoon and showed up at her office while she was on a break between appointments. Her own office was located on the top floor of a ten-story building on the east side of Union Square, looking out on the palm trees of the park.

“It’s also not going to change what a son of a bitch Marvin was,” Jason added.

Frankie’s lips bent into a sad smile. “I know that, too.”

“So how do you feel?” He asked it in a clinical way. They were both scientists. Sometimes it was hard to remember they were husband and wife, too. She expected him to take out a yellow pad and start taking notes while they talked.

“I feel off,” she said.

“Can you be more specific?”

“Not really. Something’s not right with me, Jason, but I don’t know what it is.”