I came home from the funeral to tell my parents and sister that my husband had left me $8.5m and 6 Manhattan lofts. When I walked into the house, I overheard my parents talking. What they were saying… made my blood run cold.

I called all three of them. I called Patricia Hobbes, my mother, at 6:00 in the morning the day Nathan collapsed. She picked up on the fourth ring and said, “Oh, FA, that’s terrible.” Like I told her, the car needed a new alternator. Then she said, “We’ll talk when you come home. Chloe has a fitting for her engagement dress this weekend, so it’s been hectic.”

My husband was dead. My sister had a dress fitting.

I stand at the front of the chapel now and try to say something about Nathan, about the way he folded his drafting paper into tiny cranes when he was thinking, about the six years we spent together and how every single one of them was better than the 25 I lived before him. My voice cracks twice. Nobody from my family is here to notice.

Afterward, James Whitfield finds me on the chapel steps. He shakes my hand, firm, steady.

“Nathan loved you,” he says. “He made sure of that. Then, come see me Monday, Fay. It’s important.”

I don’t understand the weight of those words yet. I will.