“Oh, Serena. Something really terrible has happened.” She starts to cry. Her tears don’t instinctively alarm me. She’s always cried fairly easily, and what is terrible to her is rarely terrible to me. I prepare myself to fake the shock of learning about Scot’s long-standing affair with Nanci Lee, although why she had to pull me out of class to tell me, I don’t know. I’ll tell her what I’ve learned recently about Grimshaw, that some people fit together and some people don’t, that absence and loss can either be an ache or an opportunity.

“Look at you,” she cries. “I wish I could express how very proud of you I am.”

“Why? What happened?” I ask.

Gripping the back of her chair, she closes her eyes for a few seconds. “Amen,” she whispers. She opens her eyes. She sits on her couch and pats the cushion next to her. I sit.

“Serena. It’s about Melody. Grimshaw.” She takes a breath. “Melody Grimshaw is …”

“Dead.” We both say it at the same time. I don’t know why I say it, because it’s obviously not true, but it just seemed like how that sentence was going to end. So I stare at my mother, waiting for her to tell me what’s really going on. She stares back at me. She takes both my hands and tells me that there was an incident in a motel room. She starts talking to me about shock and grief and bereavement, about counselors and all the help that’s there for me, while I’m still waiting for her to break the news about Scot and Nanci Lee.

I take my hands back. “Can I use your phone?” I ask. “I know where she works, in LA. I went there. I’ll call her.”

Mom moves in close. “Oh …” she breathes. She takes my face in both her hands. Her palms are cool and dry. I’d forgotten how they felt. “My darling, precious child. My sweet girl.”

I take her hands down and then I get up and go to the office phone on her desk. It was a mistake to let the silence last this long. “It doesn’t matter if she still hates me,” I tell my mother. “I mean, I know you have to let people go sometimes, but I let her go too easily, just because she got mad at me. Being mad—that’s not the end of the world, is it?”

“No,” my mother says. “It’s not.” Tears are running down her face.

“We’d get mad at each other,” I explain. “She gets sick of me, sick of my big mouth and bad attitude, just like you.” I pick up the phone and stare at my mother, who stares back at me. She takes the phone out of my hand. She leads me back to the couch, and we sit down.