10:28 P.M.

SOMETHING IS HAPPENING BETWEEN Conrad and Audrey. We’re still waiting on dessert, but they’ve turned toward each other and for the last three minutes have not been engaging with the rest of the table. He refills her water glass and then, in a flourish, retrieves her dropped napkin from the floor. The rest of us have left our side conversations and are watching them like act three of a movie.

“This can’t end well,” Jessica whispers to me.

“How come?” I ask.

Jessica looks at me like I’m nuts. “She’s dead, remember?”

I think about Conrad’s wife, how he’s been alone these last few years, what he probably wouldn’t give to be at dinner with her. And yet his words: The beat goes on.

Conrad leans over and whispers something in Audrey’s ear, and she laughs, a hand placed delicately on her heart.

“Excuse me,” Jessica says to them. “What’s so funny?”

Audrey seems caught, like she’s momentarily forgotten where she is. “Oh,” she says. “Oh, I’m sorry. Conrad was just regaling me with an anecdote about the theater.”

“I’m sure we’d like to hear, too,” Jessica says. She’s ribbing them, but Tobias and I are probably the only ones who notice.

“Nonsense, we’re old-timers here. Just having a look back,” Conrad says.

“I swear to it,” Audrey says. “I don’t think I’d be able to live today. These cell phones—everyone buried in them.”

“Tell me about it,” Robert says. “The girls won’t put them down. I used to hate them, but I know my wife appreciates them now. When she’s not with them she gets to do—” He holds his hand in front of his face as if he’s speaking to it.

“FaceTime?” Tobias offers.

“Right. FaceTime with the baby.”

“How do you know that?” I ask. “You were gone before he was born.”

“I check in,” Robert says, almost sheepishly. “On you, too.”

I look at Tobias.

“Yes,” he says.

I open my eyes and close them again. Audrey’s shoulder is now touching Conrad’s. Neither of them is moving.

“Just with people you love?”

“Sure,” Audrey says. “Although as you go on … you do it less. It becomes necessary to move on, even there.”

She holds my gaze and I look away. “Do you wish you were still here?” I ask her. “Would you want to be?”

Audrey glances at Conrad. “That’s a hard question to answer,” she says. “I’d be very old.”

“Would you have wanted more time?” I ask.

“I could have done more work with UNICEF,” she says. “I loved my later years with them; I would have liked to do more. And the children, of course.”

I can’t help but think that doesn’t really answer the question, and I can tell Audrey knows, too.

“You don’t miss it, if that’s what you’re asking,” she says. “Life is very difficult. This is not.”

“She’s right,” Robert says. “It’s like the sweetest Sunday, really.”

If I had known, if I had prepared, if Tobias weren’t sitting next to me with time running through an hourglass, I’d have questions. I’d want to know what happens when you die, whether you pass through a tunnel, whether there’s a light. I’d like to know if you can hang out with people, if you see everyone you lost again—and what the deal with reincarnation is—but there is only so much we can accomplish in one dinner, and the priorities of this one have long been set.

“Fascinating,” Conrad says. He pats her arm, and she blushes.

“You’ll see,” she whispers, in that signature breathless voice that made her so famous. A hush falls over the table. Even Tobias is looking at her as if drugged.

“And you?” Conrad asks Tobias. “You said it was different.”

“I said it, actually,” Audrey says.

“But it’s true?” Conrad asks.

“Yes,” Tobias says. “It is.”

“Why?”

Tobias looks at me. “I think I’m still between,” he says. “I’m hopeful this dinner might sort some of that out.”

“Is that common?” Conrad asks.

“I don’t know,” Tobias says. “I don’t think so.”

Again, I feel that spark of hope. He’s not gone. Not yet. In fact, his admission makes me feel closer than ever to bringing him back.

Next to me, Jessica doesn’t say anything. She’s looking down into her tea, and I see, in fact, that she’s crying.

“Jess,” I say. “What’s wrong?”

“You think she watches Douglas?” she asks me. “She didn’t…” She breaks off, and I am reminded, of course, of her mother. Of the cancer that came to claim her. Of the absence of her. At Jessica’s graduation. Wedding. The birth of her child. What wouldn’t she do to have one dinner with her? To get one night to tell her everything that happened and all the ways it was unfair? To sit in her presence and touch and gaze and mourn?

“Yes,” I say. “Of course.”

It’s this realization—that this dinner, whatever it may not be, is a stroke of luck, of fate, of fortune—that makes me turn to Robert.

“I tried to find you,” I tell him. His head snaps from Audrey to me faster than a falling water droplet. “I found out you were in California. I even got so far as your house, but I couldn’t bring myself to knock on the door.”

“When?” Robert asks.

“I was sixteen, maybe,” I say. “I borrowed Mom’s car, and she called me when I was sitting in the driveway. I don’t remember about what. When I was coming home or what I wanted for dinner. But as soon as I hung up with her, I turned around and left.”

Robert hangs his head and nods. “I understand.”

“It felt like a betrayal,” I say. “I’m sorry, I wish I would have gone inside.”

“Your mother?” Conrad asks.

I nod.

“She would want this for you,” Audrey says. She leans forward onto her elbows—something she hasn’t done all evening. “She might not know it now, but she would. The petty stuff…”

“This isn’t petty,” Jessica says a little defensively. “He left them. Jessica’s mother raised her.”

“I believe you told us she asked him to leave,” Conrad says.

“She didn’t have a choice,” Jessica fires back.

I have a flash of fierce love for Jessica, and I remember how much she loves my mom. How whenever my mom would send a care package to our apartment it was always for “the girls.” And when she would come to town the three of us would go to dinner. She still buys Jessica birthday presents every year. She knew Jessica’s mom was gone and took it upon herself to sneak in, however peripherally, wherever she could.

“Of course,” Audrey says, still sitting forward. “These things are not mutually exclusive. He did leave. And yet he’s here now. And Sabrina’s mother would want her to forgive him.”

“Oh,” Robert says. “I don’t—”

“You do,” Audrey says. “That’s why you’re here.”

I look at Conrad, who stares straight back at me. “Is she right?” he says.

I think about my father, about Tobias, sitting next to me. About all the ways the men in my life have not lived up to what I needed from them. But I told Tobias I wouldn’t stay with him. Wasn’t I responsible, too?

I look at Audrey. I see a strength there I’ve never seen before—not tonight, and not in all my years watching her onscreen. Her features, her voice, her body were always so birdlike, so delicate and complex in nature that the simplicity of power never seemed relevant. But now I see her seated here in all her regal glory, and she is big and bold—she takes up the whole room.

“Of course she’s right,” I say, still looking at her.

“Forgiveness,” Conrad repeats, like it’s a stone he’s turning over in his hands. “It’s more for the bestower than the bestowed.”

“First there’s something I have to tell you,” Robert says. “It might change your tone.”

“Go on,” Conrad says. “Time is wasting.”

“The story I told you? About the baby your mom lost?”

“Yes?”

“The miscarriage wasn’t from natural causes. Your mother was in a car accident.”

“Oh dear,” Conrad says. “Poor woman.”

Jessica winces next to me. I don’t have to hear the rest to know what’s coming.

“I was driving,” Robert says. He looks at me, and his eyes are full of pain. I think, briefly, of the promise of afterlife—freedom from suffering.

“I was drunk. We had gone to dinner in New Hope, and I was driving us back. I’d had too much wine. Your mother had asked to drive, but I told her I was fine—she was pregnant, you see. I didn’t want to tax her.” Robert holds his fist to his mouth. “We were going to name her Isabella.”

“Beautiful name,” Audrey says.

Robert gives her a small, sad smile.

“I did this,” Robert says. “I don’t expect your forgiveness. I don’t deserve it.”

I think of Jessica’s mom, Conrad’s wife. This strange opportunity I’ve been given.

“You do,” I say. In my lap, my hands shake. “We both do.”