My stepmother called just as the day was folding into evening, her voice dripping with a satisfaction so sharp I could almost see the smile stretching across her face. She told me, with deliberate precision, that I would never set foot in the family beach house again—that every lock had already been changed.

The door to the pantry stood open, and I saw immediately that the top shelf had been reorganized by someone who did not understand sentiment and therefore did not recognize it when it was right in front of them. My mother’s glass jars of hand-labeled dried herbs, preserved for no practical reason after she died because none of us were ever going to cook with ten-year-old rosemary, had vanished. I had left them there on purpose, absurd and brittle and precious, because sometimes grief needs objects.

I put a hand on the pantry frame to steady myself.

Evelyn’s voice came from behind me. “Rebecca?”

“I’m fine.”

It wasn’t true, but it was close enough for public purposes.

There were more losses upstairs. My mother’s bedroom—later called the guest room by Diana, as if changing the name changed the dead—had been turned into some kind of “primary suite sitting room,” according to a brochure from a local furniture store lying on the dresser. The quilt my grandmother stitched by hand when my parents married was gone. So was the reading chair by the window, the one where my mother used to sit in a white cotton nightgown with her coffee while the sky lightened over the water.