Sally was actually shaking. I could tell, because the table had one leg shorter than the others, and it was sort of buzzing against the floor as she sat there. She said, “I told him I’d have to check it out with you.” I could barely hear her.

“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s fine.” Sally got up and came around the table and she hugged me, and now I couldn’t tell which one of us was trembling. She whispered into my hair, “Jenny, he’s a good, good man—he is, baby, you’d know it if you ever just talked to him for five minutes. He’s kind, and he’s funny, and I feel like myself when I’m with him. I’ve never felt that way with anybody, never, I never have.” Then she grinned at me, looking like a little kid again, and said, “Well, present company excepted, natch.” Which was a nice thing to say, but silly, too, because she knew better. We got on well enough most days, but not the way she was talking about. I only felt really like myself with Mister Cat, back then. Back before Tamsin.

Anyway, Sally kept hugging me and going on about Evan, and I just kept standing there, waiting to feel something besides numb. My breath was sort of hardening in my chest, like the asthma attacks I used to get when I was little. But I wasn’t wheezing or anything—it was more like things inside me pushing up all close together, huddling together. When I did finally manage to speak, it sounded like somebody else, somebody far away, nobody I knew. I said, “Are you going to have to go to England? With him?”

The way Sally looked at me was like that moment in a cartoon where the fox or the coyote runs straight off the cliff and doesn’t know it right away, but just keeps on running in the air. She said slowly, like a question, “Well, honey, sure, of course we are,” and then her eyes got all wet again, so now of course she couldn’t talk for a bit. I gave her my wad of Kleenex, because to this day she absolutely never has one—I don’t know how she manages. She blew her nose and grabbed hold of my shoulders and shook me a little. “Baby,” she said. “Baby, did you think I was just going to walk off and leave you? Don’t you know I wouldn’t go anywhere without you, not for Evan McHugh, not for anybody? Don’t you know that?” Her voice sounded weird, too, like a cartoon voice.