“Try not to worry about it,” Amy reassured her. “You love each other. It will be fine.”

“What if I marry him and he dies?” She was thinking of her father, and her eyes filled with tears as she looked at her friend.

Amy spoke to her gently and could see how frightened she was. “Sooner or later, if you stay together until you’re old, one of you is going to die. I don’t think you need to worry about that for a hell of a long time,” she said to reassure her, but her fears were deeper than that.

“I just think about it sometimes. I know what my mom went through when my dad died.” She had been eleven, and she remembered her mother crying all the time, and then going out to find a job to support them. She had been a book editor in a publishing house for years, and had retired only the year before. She had time now to do things she had wanted to do for years and had never had time for: see her friends, play bridge, exercise, take cooking lessons, play golf. For several years now, she had been working on a history of their family genealogy, which she found fascinating and Brigitte didn’t. But Brigitte never wanted to end up a widow, with a young child, like her mother. She’d rather stay single, just the way she was, forever.

Brigitte had dealt with her father’s suicide in therapy when she was younger. She had forgiven him, but she had never gotten over her fear of change and taking risks. And she was feeling badly shaken at the prospect of Ted’s possible proposal that night. So much so that she called her mother after work, before she went out to dinner, and her mother could hear the worry in her voice, and without explanation, Brigitte started talking about her father. It had been a long time since she’d done that, and her mother was puzzled. Brigitte didn’t explain why.