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pulled out my planner. Every day was blank, with the exception of the notation regarding a meeting with the department heads a week in the future. “Anytime.” Loser.
    â€œGo to Nordstrom as soon as possible, ” she said, “and pick something out. No black.”
    Black was my fallback color. “Black is the new…black,” I said, striving for a little humor.
    â€œBlack is blech, ” she said. “I like black just as much as the next washed-out New York beatnik, but not for my wedding. Find something sexy. Fun.”
    Sexy. Fun. Who did she think was buying this dress? Certainly not me. Right now I was dour and morose, but I didn’t think Nordstrom had a section devoted to those adjectives. I could see the tagline now: “Dour. Morose. The latest in wedding glamour.” “I’ll give it my best shot, Max,” I said, but she had hung up.
    I took my car keys from my pocketbook and started to walk to my car, parked in the lot right behind my office. I heard my name being called and I stopped, turning to look around the dark lot. The person in the shadows was a few feet away and small, thin, and dressed in black. I squinted in the hazy charcoal of dusk, trying to discern who it was and my breath caught in my throat when I made out the outline of Gianna Miceli.
    â€œGianna?”
    She approached me tentatively, one hand outstretched. “Alison.”
    Gianna Miceli and I had a complicated history. We had attended St. Thomas at the same time, and although she was two years older than I was and we shouldn’t have had anything to do with each other, we found ourselves linked together by tragedy. Gianna’s daughter, Kathy, had been murdered earlier this year, an event that had rocked the campus and my own world. A couple of sordid things come to mind when I think of her death: one, that she had been found in the trunk of my car, and two, that she had had a relationship with my ex-husband. I hesitate to call it an “affair” because what nineteen-year-old girl sets out to have an affair, a word that has serious and somewhat tawdry connotations? I preferred to think of it as a relationship because I was sure that Kathy thought that’s what it was.
    I walked toward her and embraced her, at the time the obvious thing to do. The dark circles under her eyes highlighted the grief etched on her face and it was apparent to me that she was still in the depths of a fathomless despair. I held her at arm’s length. “What are you doing here?”
    She motioned to a dorm across campus. “I came to clean out Kathy’s room. This is the first day I’ve been able to face it.”
    Students had been in the dorms for a couple of weeks already, so Gianna was a little late to the task. I guessed that the Housing Office had decided against opening the room to new students and would leave it unoccupied for at least the year, if not longer. I looked down at her, her face illuminated by a spotlight hanging off the dorm behind us.
    â€œHow is the rest of your family?”
    She shrugged. “Fine.”
    â€œMax is getting married,” I said, for want of something else to say.
    â€œWho’s Max?” she asked.
    I started to explain that she had known Max at St. Thomas but gave up. It didn’t seem to matter if she remembered Max or not. I decided to shut up.
    Clearly, we had nothing to say to each other. Despite the history we had we were nothing more than acquaintances bonded in death and tragedy. I thought back on our shared time at St. Thomas—she was the rich golden girl whose father had a dubious occupation; on the surface, he owned a restaurant but talk ran to his now-confirmed Mob connections. When she took up with Peter Miceli in her junior year, a fat, prematurely balding guy with absolutely no game or brains to speak of, we were all very surprised. What I remember about Peter was that he was always trying to get me to ride in his