The priest finished. Delilah stood to give the readings. Andrea did the prayers with a stiff upper lip, and then Jeffrey rose to do the eulogy. The church was silent. Jeffrey had the bearing of Abraham Lincoln—tall, lean, stately—and he was an orator, too. That was a Cornell education for you. Jeffrey talked about meeting Tess for the first time when she was fifteen years old, a sophomore at Boston Latin, and so naive about the world that at dinner that first night, while helping Andrea set the table, she put ice cubes in Jeffrey’s beer.

The church laughed. It was so Tess. Even at thirty-five, there had been things she was so naive about.

April Peck was in the church. The Chief, who liked to know where his sniper was, had her pegged in row nine.

Danny Browne had found opiates in the blood. Tess shooting heroin? This was impossible; there was a mistake with the tox report.

The night before, the Chief and Andrea had gone through the Coast Guard bag. Andrea took the broken sunglasses for Chloe and Tess’s flip-flops for Kacy, but they were way too small. Together they asked Eric if he wanted Greg’s guitar—there had been a period of time when Eric was keen for Greg to teach him to play—but Eric said he wanted to think about it. When Andrea saw the macaroons still watertight in their Tupperware, she burst into sobs. The delicate emotional business of going through the personal effects ended then and there. The Chief pitched everything else, except for the guitar and the overnight bag. There was a whole house full of stuff to be gone through, and the will to administer. Addison had been named executor back in 2000, when Greg and Tess bought their house. The will had been written before Chloe and Finn were born and had never been updated. Never been updated! No guardians named! This was an egregious oversight on Greg’s part; it was one of a million loose ends that would surface, the Chief was sure, once the man’s life was examined. Andrea was adamant about taking the kids. Tess’s brother Anthony agreed, saying, You were not only her family, you were her best friend.

And heaven help the poor soul now who tried to take those kids away from Andrea.

As the Chief was dealing with the remains of the personal effects, he noticed that the Ziploc bag with Tess’s iPhone was missing. He rummaged through what he had already pitched into the trash, thinking the bag might have gotten mixed in accidentally. He didn’t see it. He checked through the overnight bag—Greg’s boxers, the black lace lingerie thingie of Tess’s, toothbrushes, hair-brush, polo shirt, khaki shorts, Noxema, Advil. No phone. What had happened to the Ziploc? The Chief checked the mudroom. His family stowed every last pair of shoes they owned in there, so in total maybe fifty pairs of shoes were jumbled in baskets that Andrea bought from Holdeverything to contain the mess. The Chief sat down and dutifully emptied the boxes of shoes—nothing—and then got on his hands and knees and checked under the cast-iron radiator. Nothing. He checked the trash again.

Okay, the iPhone was gone. Someone had taken it. Andrea? She had been avoiding the bag of personal effects as if it contained the Ebola virus. So no. Kacy or Eric? It wasn’t impossible, but both Kacy and Eric had been quiet and introspective since the deaths, and considerate of their mother. They wouldn’t have removed anything from the Coast Guard bag without asking. Chloe or Finn? Chloe, maybe—she was seven going on seventeen—but was she sneaky or curious enough to lift her mother’s phone? There had been people in and out of the house for the past five days. It could have been anyone.

The cell phone. Jeffrey was still up there talking, now about Chloe and Finn and how it was the responsibility of everyone in the church to raise them into adults and remind them each and every day how much their parents had loved them.

Amen. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Including the Chief’s own. He pulled out a handkerchief. He had the summer cops outside to worry about, and opiates in Tess’s bloodstream, and two more children to raise when his own two were nearly out of the house, and a wife who would hit the anger stage of grief prematurely if April Peck and her mother dared to show up at the reception. She would attack like a Siberian tiger who hadn’t been fed in two weeks. And the cell phone (five calls from Addison in half an hour) was missing.

But the funeral was almost over; those caskets were going into the ground. It was unspeakably sad and awful and unfair, and the Chief was going to shed a few tears. He deserved it.

PHOEBE

She couldn’t make herself cry during the funeral, no matter how hard she tried. She was rummaging for anything, even horror—after all, the dead bodies of her friends, Tess and Greg MacAvoy, were moldering in those caskets. But no, nothing. If she had feelings, they were shriveled and cold, hiding in a dark corner somewhere.

The recessional hymn played. Phoebe caught a glimpse of Chloe and Finn from the side. Finn was crying, and Chloe had her arms around him as if he were her child. She was whispering something. Phoebe watched her lips. She was singing the hymn. And I will raise you up. On the last day.

Phoebe was rapt. Something inside her peeled back, revealing…

In another second the priest would head down the aisle and the caskets would follow.

Phoebe got out of her seat. She scurried over to Chloe and Finn. She said something, inaudible to her own ears over the organ and the halfhearted singing, but Chloe and Finn seemed to hear her. They seemed to understand. They were nodding.

They understood her! Really understood. Phoebe could see it in their eyes.

You still have each other, she’d said. You still have each other.

JEFFREY