My daughter called that night.

Robin calls me on Sunday evenings, dutifully, a fifteen-minute call we have both learned to survive, and it was a Thursday, so I knew before I answered that Lottie had called her first.

“Aunt Lottie says you’re reopening Mom’s shop.” Robin is thirty-eight and lives ninety minutes away and manages a hospital pharmacy and has a daughter I have met exactly six times, and there is between us a politeness so smooth and so complete that it is worse than any argument.

Franny had been the bridge.