Breathing heavily, she asked, “Hey, can you hear me now?”

“Yes, I can hear you.” Those were the last words Liza spoke that were intelligible for a few minutes. Between Liza’s sobs and her strangled sentences as she choked back tears, Tricia put together the enormity of the situation. Clearly Liza had been composed until she heard Tricia’s voice.

Poor Liza. And poor Julia. How awful for both of them.

Tricia knew what she had to do. Liza was stretched so thin there in Southport handling the arrangements, a euphemism for all the awful details of death, that she couldn’t handle any of the larger issues that needed to be handled, like informing her father’s colleagues. Maggie, who was usually a minor mess, would be a complete mess for days, if not weeks. Balance and focus were always Tricia’s strengths. She was the one Sweeney sister who could be both the backbone and the emotional core at this juncture and she knew she had to hold the whole operation together.

“I’ll call Cap. Does he know?” A muffled “yes” came back. It didn’t surprise Tricia that Liza had already called Cap, her father’s friend and lawyer. It was the right thing to do. “We’ll have to figure out the press piece. I’ll follow up with Cap. Don’t worry about that. You just do what you need to do there in terms of state procedure.” The rest of the call was brief and clinical, ending with Tricia promising, “I’ll get there as soon as I can.

Text me if you want backup on any decisions. We got this.”

Tricia took the stairs back down to her desk. It took her about seventeen minutes to make the calls she needed to make, send the emails that had to be sent, and reschedule the meetings that needed to be rescheduled. She had two brief conversations with fellow associates, imparting information with speed and accuracy. Tricia thought about all those training runs, those miserable, hot steamy miles and hills in August in the Berkshires with the team. Or the frigid early-morning speed workouts in January on the track in New Haven. All this time, she’d thought it was about running, but it was really about preparing her for the last seventeen minutes and the next few hours of pain, when she had to remain focused long enough to leave work, go to her apartment and pack a few things, and then get on the train out to Southport. This was the moment where developing all that endurance and a high pain threshold finally paid off.

“Can I see Don? It’s an emergency,” Tricia asked Danette, the executive assistant to the managing partner she was working for, a new hire named

Don Donaldson, a name Tricia and her fellow associates at KMT had already dissected over drinks at P. J. Clarke’s. ( How lazy do your parents have to be to not even bother to think up a first name different than your last name? Had they given up on parenting seconds after the birth? ) Don had been a “big hire,” lured over from another firm with a giant signing bonus and immediately put on the partner track because of his impressive client list and his overall asshole behavior that seemed to be rewarded at every turn in New York City. Tricia was not a fan, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t worked her hardest for him over the last nine months. Do not cry in front of this guy, she thought to herself as he waved her into his office.

“Don, I’m going to need a few days off. I got a call. My father . . .” Tricia took a deep breath. “My father died this morning. I need to go home.”

“Oh, Sweeney, I’m sorry to hear that. Are you okay?” It was the most personal question he’d ever asked her, except for the time he chest-bumped her at a Legal League softball game and then asked if her breasts were fake.

“I mean, you’re so skinny. How could those be real? Am I right?” Don had asked the small crowd, seeking validation for his lax bro behavior.

“It was unexpected,” Tricia responded now.

Don nodded like he cared, but then it was back to business. “So, are you all covered then for your work? I mean, obviously you should be with your family, but you’re covered, right?” He was referring to the class action workplace discrimination suit filed by women at one of the Big Five automakers. Kingsley, Maxwell & Traub represented the automaker. He knew Tricia’s work product was invaluable to the case; plus, it didn’t hurt that she was a woman. “I mean, the class just certified, this is crunch time.”

Prick. “Yes, all set. I’ve cc’d you and Danette on several emails detailing what I was working on. Penny Caruso and Ryan Lee will take over on point on discovery. I’ll keep in touch with them.”

“Great. Well, good luck!” Don said it like Tricia was embarking on a slightly exotic honeymoon to Costa Rica, not a Metro-North train ride to bury her father. Maybe he sensed how cold his send-off sounded because he followed up with something more human. “What did your old man do, Sweeney? Lawyer?”

Never. “My father was a writer.” There it was, the past tense. My father was a writer.

“Oh yeah? Did he write anything I might have heard of?”

Because that’s the mark of a worthwhile career, whether or not Don Donaldson has heard of you, Tricia thought. “My father was William Sweeney.”

The light dawned in his tired eyes. “The William Sweeney? Like Never Not Nothing William Sweeney? And that Vietnam book? What was it called? Um, Bitter Fruit. That William Sweeney?”

There was that Dartmouth education emerging from the swamp of Don Donaldson’s normal workplace interaction. Yes, Don, not only have you heard of William Sweeney, he probably blew your mind during junior year English at Hotchkiss or during Senior Seminar in Hanover. You and millions of other readers like yourself—smart, smug, know-it-all white guys who got your literary comeuppance, courtesy of a William Sweeney classic.

You thought you were the hero in your own life, but thanks to William Sweeney, you discovered you were just some average schmuck, grinding out a daily existence that may or may not add up to something in the end and that enlightened you for a semester or, if you were lucky, a lifetime. You probably still have a couple of Sweeney titles on your bookshelves, Don, in your Chelsea loft that you share with your lawyer girlfriend, though you haven’t read a complete novel since that old John Grisham you discovered in your rental house on Block Island two summers ago. “Yes. That William Sweeney.”

The lawyer lowered his head contritely. “I really am sorry. He was . . .

brilliant. I read that piece in The New Yorker he wrote a few years ago about Jeter. ‘The Captain.’ I was a fucking mess on the 1 train.”

With that, Tricia felt the tears prick behind her eyes. It was happening all over again, like when her mother died. Tricia could stay composed in public until someone said something nice, something kind, and then she felt the sadness overwhelm her. At the grocery store, the shoe department at Bloomie’s, the deli buying a sandwich. One kind word from a stranger or acquaintance would sneak its way through her armor and hit an emotional bull’s-eye. But not today, not in this guy’s office. Don Donaldson didn’t get to be the first one to see her grieve.

Tricia bit her lip to bring herself back. “Thank you. He was a brilliant writer.” She had turned to leave when a thought struck. “Can I ask you to please keep this confidential? We’d like to make sure the whole family knows before it becomes public and, as you’ve noted, my father was a

public figure, so we’re establishing a protocol for releasing the information to the press.”

Confidentiality was one thing lawyers understood, even DD, as Don often called himself in meetings. “Of course, Sweeney.”

In reality, Tricia didn’t want Don Donaldson scooping the New York Times with some post or tweet about how his literary hero had passed away, setting off a press frenzy. Her father deserved better, the dignity of a news alert, or at least, followed by an outpouring from fans on social media.

Tricia smiled, thinking that was exactly what William Sweeney would say about some fellow writer whose career-defining death notice had been undermined by some no-name on the twenty-third floor. She could hear it in his Hamden accent: Poor guy. His lousy lawyer blurted it out online. He didn’t even get an official press release. That’s no way to go out. Her father could make a great story out of nothing. The simplest encounter became an epic. Who would tell those stories now?

“Thanks, Don.” She had no doubt that this story—of keeping William Sweeney’s death a secret—would become one of Don’s go-to anecdotes at happy hour.

As she walked out of the office, Patricia Beckett Sweeney realized that while caring for her father for the past ten years had been no picnic, protecting his legacy would be even more complicated.