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secrets. A secret is only good if at least two people are keeping it. Poor Sophie, mourning hers, grieving for skin—but no, no sympathy for that either. It’s a tough, judgmentalworld. She supposes the rock in her throat is what she deserves.
    She straightens. This won’t do. Phil’s death is only one of many, many, many scattered over the earth today. That god’s-eye perspective ought to be comforting: what’s the loss of one man, however clever his hands, measured against the world’s huge, genuine tragedies? But how offended Phil would be by the notion that the weight of his life comes up short in comparison. And he’d be right. Either every death counts, or no death does. Which religion calls despair the most terrible sin? Doesn’t matter. Even at this moment, Sophie knows the difference between grief and despair. Grief is running into Phil’s room this morning and learning from Nora’s scream, her distraught, pointing finger, that he has died overnight. Despair is … something else.
    And then there’s mere shock. It was exceedingly harsh and abrupt to suggest sorting through Phil’s closets and drawers, and Sophie’s sorry about that. But then, it was an excessive moment.
    She’s doing the best she can, honestly.
    “It’s a completely different thing,” Phil said, and Sophie believed him. “It’s totally separate.” Nora was with him for almost seventeen years which is, yes, a lot more, and different, than a couple of months. Seventeen years, fifteen of them in this house, is day after day and night after night of custom and habit, not to mention hostility, not to mention inspiration, not to mention consolation. It’s many views, encounters, moods, words and tones.
    But, “I love you,” he said to Sophie.
    Now, whatever he promised Nora, whatever he told Sophie, he has upped and left both of them, hasn’t he? He has slipped away as if he were one of those unmanly menwho say they’re going out for a beer and never return. Widowhood can take several forms, not all of them open or righteous or kind. Nora can be one sort, Sophie another—one more thing that will have to be fine in its way, fair enough.

Four
    A steady diet of mortality and morbidity and grief and bewilderment is not to everyone’s taste, so it’s a good thing, a happy break, to find that Beth is a whole different story.
    Indeed, Beth is floating, Beth is lighter than air, Beth is helium-hearted as she rises upstairs, grasping the banister to hold herself down, weighting her feet to unsteady floor. She is about to make her bed and darken her room so that Nora can rest because, with Sophie off making funeral arrangements, Nora turned to Beth in the kitchen and asked, “Would you mind if I borrowed your room for a while? I’d like to lie down, but I can’t face my own.”
    “Of course you can.” Beth leaned forward and touched Nora’s hand. “You can have anything. Just give me a minute to change my clothes and close the curtains. Maybe you’ll be able to sleep.”
    “Maybe I will.”
    Philip is neither here nor there, really. Beth did not feel joy in his presence and does not feel grief in his absence. If she is guilty of anything regarding Philip, alive or dead, it is merelyof a relatively minor ill-will. But that scream this morning—Beth leaped from her own bed. To the rescue! Turned out Philip was not hurting Nora, at least not in any predictable way, but then, he never hurt Nora in predictable ways. He failed to protect, though. He did not scrupulously defend, his loyalties were divided; whereas Nora warrants a gladiator, a knight with full armour, sharp sword.
    Opportunity presents itself.
    Is Beth drunk? No, but something much like that.
    The air in the house is light, too, like Beth, like April, not deep-summer August. Except for a lingering tinge of crisp toast—and whatever possessed her to eat so much bread, so much anything?—the atmosphere is pure, rarefied, intoxicating. Oh, Beth could skip to the top of