“Especially then,” he said, and tapped her whipped-cream nose.

Mia nodded, satisfied, and went back to her pie.

I looked around that warm, noisy room and understood something.

The silence that had frozen the bistro six months earlier had never really gone. It had only changed shape.

First it was the silence of shock.

Then it became the silence of a family refusing to bury what had happened to protect one person’s ego.