“I think it’s called grief.”

He was right, but that didn’t make her feel better. Another husband might have come out of his chair and hugged her, but that wasn’t Jason, and that wasn’t the kind of relationship they had. They weren’t touchy-feely.

She’d met him seven years ago at a conference in Barcelona. He was British. They were both in their early thirties. She’d noticed when she met him that he was handsome, although their interactions were purely professional in the beginning. He had an athletic build and close-cropped black hair. His dark eyes missed nothing, and he had an expressive mouth that could shift from humor to disdain with a twitch of his lips. His face was full of sharp angles, and so was his personality. She liked that. She hated men who tried to woo her.

They’d stayed in touch after the conference because they both specialized in memory. He worked on the neurological side, focused on brain chemistry. She worked on the therapeutic side. Nine months later, he took a research position with a pharmaceutical company in San Francisco, and their meetings evolved slowly from professional to personal. A year after that, they married, to the amusement of her sister, Pam, who’d assumed that Frankie would never leave her clinical office long enough to meet a man.

She’d found a husband who was a carbon copy of herself. Smart. Demanding. Unemotional. Or maybe—she occasionally whispered to herself—she’d done what so many other women did and married her father.

“After he died, you told me you felt some closure with him,” Jason reminded her.

“I know. I still do.”

“Do you remember why?”

Frankie did. The camping trip snapped like a photograph into her mind. It was something that she, Pam, and their father had done annually since they were children. On New Year’s Eve, they would travel to a state park around Northern California and spend two nights there. They’d stayed as close as Angel Island in the bay and traveled as far afield as Redwood National Park north of Eureka. It was a family tradition, but their father had a way of turning the outings into intellectual exercises. He selected a discussion theme. He assigned reading and quizzed them like a professor. The topics had ranged over the years from politics to science to economics. Minimum-wage policy. Extraplanetary life. Addiction. Alaskan glaciers.

This year’s topic had been a strange departure. It was risk. Which turned out to be a tragically ironic subject in the wake of what happened to him.

“He was different with me that last evening,” Frankie said. “Maybe it’s because it was just the two of us this year. He relaxed. We talked about Mom. Before we went to sleep, he told me he was proud of me. I’d been waiting my whole life to hear something like that from him.”