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“And after that?”

“I’ll mention the retreat as if it’s absurd and decadent and probably good for women who never stop working. I’ll let her laugh at it. Then I’ll say, ‘You’d hate it, of course.’”

“She’ll want to prove she wouldn’t.”

“Yes,” he said quietly.

He was silent for half a mile. “You’re good at this.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m not happy about it.”

Then came Davina. The one I’d been dreading.

“The last one,” I said, my voice shaky despite my best efforts. “Davina Ashworth. She lost her mother four months ago. Her Facebook is still full of memorial posts. Old photographs. Comments from women saying ‘sending light’ and ‘she would be so proud of you.’”

I swallowed. “She looks open.”

Damian’s hands shifted once on the wheel.

“Not open,” he said. “Unheld.”

I hated that he knew that. But I loved him for hating it, too.

“She needs witness,” he said. “But if I ask how she is, she’ll give the answer she’s been trained to give. If I tell her she’s strong, I become everyone else.”

“So what do you do?”

“I ask what her mother was like before she was sick.”

My throat closed.

He kept his eyes on the road. “Or what she would have hated about the party. Something specific. Then I’ll remember the answer. Later, I’ll bring it up again.”

“Why?”

“So she feels there’s space for the person everyone else is slowly asking her to leave behind.”

The car suddenly felt airless.

“And then you mention the retreat?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I’ll frame it as a place where she won’t have to hide her grief just so people will want to sit next to her.”

I pressed my knuckles to my mouth.

He glanced at me. “Marlowe.”

“No, keep going. Apparently I’m the kind of person who needs to know exactly how we’re going to feed grieving women to your mother’s favorite monster.”

His expression darkened. I regretted it immediately.

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s exactly what we’re doing.”