Tessa’s call came on a September afternoon, seventeen months before Edith would return to Boston. There was silence on the other end.

Tess? Everything okay?

There were no tears, no hitching breathy sobs. Only a long, slow sigh. The gentle whisper of dying leaves. A cigarette’s crackle.

Tessa.

It’s Val, Edith.

Valerie’s phone made it through the crash immaculate; her sister found Tessa’s number in her texts. Edith asked how it had happened, and Tessa said she didn’t know. Edith asked where, and Tessa didn’t know. She might as well have asked: What were her final words. What music was on the stereo. When the light went out of her, could she feel it go? Or did she sleep through it like a child at New Year’s.

Edith found that she actually was asking these questions. They were broken by a stutter and a fist in her throat.

I was just getting used—she said. Used to what? The idea that Val wouldn’t be around? It’s so fucking stupid.

It’s so, so stupid. Tessa’s voice was thin.

Who dies in a fucking car crash.

There would be no correct questions. No amount of sense-making would unkill her.

When she stopped crying long enough to see, Edith priced flights to Boston. I think I might come up there, she said. I don’t know what else to do.

Come, Tessa said. I don’t either.

As if that would make her any more certain how to move, how to live, how to come back from this loss. As if she could decide anything so easily.

It was gauche to reminisce about better days. It was impossible to talk about the present or future. They sat there, listening to each other breathe. Like falling asleep in the same bed.