“Hey,” he said back. He spun around to face her as she sat in the Eames.

“Where’s Nikole right now? Go home. We can manage.”

“She went to her sister’s for the afternoon. I know she doesn’t want me to see how upset she is, but the shit is upsetting no matter which way you look.”

James usually had a bottle of something nice in his desk drawer—someone was always thanking him with cigars and an expensive bottle of twenty-year-old bourbon or extra añejo tequila when he probably would’ve preferred the cash and a bottle of mezcal. If there was ever a day to get loaded, it was the day you found out your wife was maybe dying.

“There’s more good in her pinky than most people have in their entire bodies,” James said, shaking his head. “It’s so fucking unfair.”

“You’re right.” Zanne wasn’t going to sling that bullshit people threw at her. She’s strong. She’s a fighter. As if cancer were just some shiny opponent in the corner of the ring who’d be dispatched by the end of the movie. And if the person you loved didn’t win, if they left you in the end, what did that make you? Not worth the fight?

With her mother, it had been fast. First symptoms at Thanksgiving, gone by Valentine’s Day. There’d been no time to gradually acquaint Zanne with Noah, the father she hadn’t seen since she was a baby. Their neighbor Mrs. Rivera and her teachers took Zanne in when her mom went into the hospital, a week here, two weeks there. Zanne was thirteen and thought she could take care of herself. But emancipation was a word for rich kids, for child stars who had money in a trust. When you were poor like her, they called you a ward of the state. When you were poor like her mom, they put your kid in foster care.

So her mom called Noah. What was he going to do, refuse? He agreed to take in his daughter, but he didn’t apologize for bailing on her in the first place. He didn’t fly out to Pomona to pay his respects at the funeral or help Zanne through the worst week of her life. Mrs. Rivera drove her to the airport. When Zanne got off the plane at Logan, she recognized Noah from the one photograph her mom had kept. He’d come alone. They drove to Braintree in awkward silence and she knew, from the silence, that she was nothing like the other two girls he had. Helen, a freshman at Boston College where he now had tenure. Marilyn, sixteen, pretty and mean. His wife, Judy, who seethed in the bedroom right next door to Zanne’s.

Yes, there was more goodness in her mom’s pinky than in the rest of them put together.