I sit up but keep the blanket over my lap, and outside the sky is heavy and dark with coming snow. Birdie leaps off the couch and runs into the kitchen, where Kateri is bringing me a cup of coffee.

“What time is it?” I ask her. She looks different off duty. Relaxed. Her hair is down, her clothes are normal. She looks young and at ease with Birdie’s energy.

“It’s three,” Kateri says, “on Saturday.”

“Wow,” I say.

“You slept hard,” she says. “It’s good. I’m sure you needed it. There are some things you need to know,” she says, sitting across from me. “When you’re ready.”

“I’m ready,” I say, and sip the coffee, aware that I’m probably not ready. I rub my eyes and ruffle my hair. I think I would love a long hot shower, but all I can think of is the white glass shower at Bear’s, and all at once it comes back to me that he’s gone, that he’s dead, and I almost spill the coffee, doubling over.

I feel Birdie get up, nervous, and I hear Kateri take her into the kitchen, get her a juice box, murmur something to her. She lets me sob for a minute, and then I sit up, empty. Everything feels unreal.

“I’m sorry,” she says to me. Birdie has gone off to play in the bedroom, the door closed most of the way.

“I’m so stupid,” I say.

“You’re not,” Kateri says. She pushes a box of tissues at me, and I dab my eyes, blow my nose. My heart feels like a crater in my chest.

“Kerpak is standing by the offer on your property,” she tells me.

It takes me a minute to reconcile what she’s saying. Kerpak Industries. Bear’s mother’s company. “I didn’t know there was an offer,” I say.

“Bear had written an offer,” she says. “Before.”

I hold up my hand. I don’t want her to say it. “Is it enough to pay off the taxes?”

“It’s two hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” Kateri says.

My throat tightens.

“Why couldn’t he have just done that?” I say. My voice breaks, and I feel like I’m swallowing rocks. What are you going to do when we go to Europe? How could he have been faking all of it?

“I don’t know the answer to that,” Kateri says. “Some people,” she starts.

“Don’t,” I say, and shake my head. “Don’t try to explain him.”

“I’m sorry,” she says. “There is also,” she continues, “money for you in the estate of Michael Jane.”

“Baby Jane?” I say, and she nods.

“I don’t know how much,” she says, “but he made it known to me that you are his sole benefactor.”

I don’t ask. I hear the word estate and I know. But I already knew it inside, that part of the empty well in my gut is that he is gone and my body felt it. In fact, that may be what I have been feeling all along. His fading, his absence.