Part One: Everything Was Already Arranged

The call came at 6:52 on a Sunday morning, and Margaret Collins knew before she picked it up.

Not the way people mean when they say that afterward.

She knew in a specific, professional way: her son-in-law’s name was on the screen at ten to seven on a Sunday, and Nathan Brooks did not call her.

In twelve years he had called her perhaps nine times, always about logistics, always at a reasonable hour.

She sat down on the edge of her bed before she answered, because thirty-one years in an emergency department had taught her that people fall down.

“Margaret.” His voice was ruined.

“Margaret, it’s Emily.”

What he told her took ninety seconds.

Emily had collapsed at home the previous night, around ten.

He had found her on the bedroom floor.

He had called 911.

They had worked on her in the apartment and again at the hospital and it had been her heart, they thought, some kind of arrhythmia, the kind that just happens, the kind nobody sees coming.

She had been declared at 11:41 p.m.

“Why didn’t you call me last night?”

There was a pause of about two seconds.

“I couldn’t,” Nathan said.

“Margaret, I couldn’t.