Lauren remained in their lives the way a coastline remains: not in every room, not gone. She sent Emma a plant-care article and a note that said, If the admissions essay follows you around campus, you may tell it to sit down. Emma wrote back, It sits. I sit too. They saw each other at Christmas in Helen's dining room, where the rules were older than their particular pain. Lauren did not sleep at the house on Elder Street. David walked her to her rental car and they stood in their coats. Sometimes they kissed. Sometimes they did not. Emma watched from the window once and did not feel the old movie-rage. She felt the ache of a story that had refused to become either a wedding or a warning. She texted him after Lauren drove away: You look like a person. He replied: High praise. Come eat the pie before your grandmother assigns it a moral.
In Emma's second year, Claire's absence changed shape again. It happened in a seminar where a girl said, casually, that dead parents were a kind of personality trait people used at parties. Emma walked out. She sat on a bench in a quad that was trying to be April and called her father.
"I don't want her to be a trait," she said.
"She isn't," David said. He was in the garage. She could hear the echo. "She's your mother. Traits don't leave voicemails."
"I miss her in a new way. Not the wedding way. The way where I want to ask her if this sweater looks like I'm trying. You're good but you're not her."