The flames jumped as Andrea laid the steaks down.

Was there a hell? She wondered. Really, was there? She had been a Catholic for forty-four years, educated by the nuns and the Jesuits, and this was the first time she’d thought to ask.

Chloe came out on the deck, holding a piece of robin’s-egg-blue construction paper folded in half. Andrea took the paper but did not look at Chloe.

“What have we here?” Andrea asked.

“A formal request,” Chloe said.

This should have been enough to make Andrea smile, but it was beyond her. She opened the paper. It had been decorated around the edges with curlicues, flowers, and birds. At the top, Chloe had written: A Formal Request.

Can we please go to Auntie Dee’s house tomorrow after camp

and perhaps spend the night?

Andrea was speechless. She resisted the urge to throw the formal request onto the grill flames. It was innocent, she reminded herself. Chloe and Finn wanted to see their friends. But still, the “formal request” was for “Auntie Dee’s house.” Auntie Dee would cut their grilled cheese into fun shapes; she would permit them to run through the sprinkler until the fireflies came out. The twins did not want Andrea. They wanted Delilah. She couldn’t blame them, but it infuriated her.

She handed the formal request back to Chloe, not able to look her in the eye. “We’ll see,” she said.

Chloe stood before her for one resigned moment. “That means no.”

“That means we’ll see.”

Chloe fled.

Andrea collapsed onto a deck chair and sank her face in her hands. Need anything?

“I need Tess back,” she whispered. Denial was such a stupid phase of grief, especially for a forty-four-year-old woman who had lost both her parents and well knew that death happened to each and every one of us. And yet at any second the finality of Tess’s death could level Andrea. She wanted to rip her hair out, tear her clothes, get on her knees and beg the sky, Bring her back!

The grill was smoking. Andrea pulled the steaks off just as the Chief walked onto the deck.

“Hey,” he said. “Those smell good.” His voice was light and chipper. How could he be chipper? It was twenty minutes to eight. He had stayed at work for twelve hours. He didn’t want to be at home with her either.

Andrea stared at the platter of steaks. They did smell good, and they had cost her seventy dollars. The grocery store was booby-trapped with land mines. She couldn’t stand to see anybody she knew. She didn’t want pity or sympathy or understanding. But neither could she tolerate cheerful, normal life moving on. She was falling apart. Couldn’t anyone see that she was falling apart?

She flipped the steaks off the deck, and they landed in her unwatered perennial bed.

“Jesus!” the Chief said. He grabbed her arm. “Andrea! What the hell?”

Need anything? She crumpled.

That night, after the Chief had pulled the steaks out of the garden dirt and washed them off, sliced them thinly, and cajoled both the twins and Andrea to eat, Andrea wandered into her bedroom, lay down on her bed fully clothed, and fell immediately to sleep.

She had the dream a third time. The man shouting for help, shouting in a language she didn’t understand, but no matter, she understood the urgency. She swam out, she grabbed hold of him, she said, Just float. I’ll get us in. I’m a lifeguard! She noticed his deep blue eyes. And then later, when he was walking away, she noticed his salt-and-pepper curls, his earring. When Phoebe lifted her face from the towel, Andrea felt her heart break. Of course he belonged to someone else. He belonged to Phoebe. But she felt something else, too: hope, anticipation.

And there they were, in the Jeep, clawing at one another, sucking, biting. He was behind her, but she didn’t like it. I want to see you! she said. I want to see your face! She could feel his fingers on her nipples, his mouth on her neck. But she wanted to see his face! She turned.

It was Jeffrey.

DELILAH

Delilah was the best storyteller, and so she would tell the story of Greg and April Peck, the whole sphere of it—Greg’s side, April’s side, Tess’s side. That was the only way to understand. To hear only Greg’s side or only April’s side was like taking one slice out of an apple and claiming the rest of it wasn’t rotten.

Delilah considered herself a neutral third party, a Switzerland, a safe place for either Tess or Greg to go. But really, it was so much more complicated than that. (The most frustrating thing about being an adult was, indeed, how complicated everything was. Throw a party, write a letter to the editor, buy your children a PlayStation—there would be consequences and repercussions you never expected.) The Greg-and-April-Peck story was complicated by the fact that Delilah was in love with Greg.

Okay, there, she’d said it.

She was in love with Greg MacAvoy, who was now dead. And would it be flattering herself to say that he had been in love with her, too? Halfway in love? Delilah had been his confidante, his almost-lover. They were always this close to crossing the line into that territory.

It had started in Vegas, at Le Cirque, with his hand on her foot and then trilling up the back of her leg. This had tipped her off: Greg was interested. His interest made her interested. His interest had, tangentially, been responsible for her taking the dining room manager position at the Begonia. She wanted to be close to Greg outside of the scope of their group friendship. How? The Scarlet Begonia. Delilah worked four nights a week, most of them nights when Greg played and sang. It was officially impossible to watch Greg up onstage with his dark hair flopping in his eyes and his vine tattoo encircling his biceps and his feet in deck shoes no matter what the weather and listen to him sing “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and feel anything except powerless against his charms. Every woman in that bar, on any given night, would sleep with him. Delilah placed herself in a distinct category from these women; she was his friend.