“She’ll be glad you’re there,” Mr. Fox said.

“Glad doesn’t figure into this,” Marina said.

Marina was going along to help Mr. Fox, and she went out of respect for her dead friend, but she had no illusions that she was the person Karen Eckman would want to break the news. It was true that she knew Karen, but only as well as a forty-two-year-old woman with no children knows a forty-three-year-old woman with three, as well as any single woman who works with the husband ever knows the wife who stays at home. Marina understood that Karen had made a point of knowing her even if Karen had not consciously mistrusted her. Karen engaged her in conversation when it was Marina who answered the phone in the lab. She invited her to their Christmas open house and the Fourth of July barbeque, where she got Marina a glass of tea and asked her thoughtful questions about protein research and said she really liked her shoes, a vaguely exotic pair of yellow satin flats a cousin had sent her from Calcutta years ago, shoes she loved herself and saved for special occasions. When Marina in turn asked about the boys, what they were doing in school, whether or not they were going to camp, Karen answered the questions offhandedly, offering up very few details. She was not the sort of mother to bombard her husband’s polite colleague with the endless talk of Scout meetings. Marina knew that Karen was not afraid of her. Marina was, after all, overly tall and bony with impenetrable eyes and heavy black hair that set her apart from all the Swedes; it was only that Karen didn’t want Marina to forget her. And Marina did not forget her, but what was important between them was so deeply unspoken that there was never the chance to defend herself from that of which she had never been accused and was not guilty. Marina was not the kind of woman who fell in love with another woman’s husband, any more than she was the kind of woman who would break into the house at night and steal the grandmother’s engagement ring, the laptop, the child.