"Now," she said, and Gus understood.

James was operating at the hospital, so Gus brought Chris along in his car seat. "We'll find Michael," she assured Melanie. She placed Melanie's hand on the gearshift, telling her to squeeze when it started to hurt. At the Emergency pavilion, she parked the car. "Stay here," she said, grabbing Chris and running through the sliding doors. "You have to help me," she shouted to a triage nurse. "There's a woman in labor."

The nurse blinked at her, at Chris. "Looks to me like you're too late," she said.

"It's not me," Gus said. "It's my friend. In the car."

--------------------------------------------------------------

"Phoebe," he said. "Thanks for calling."

"Your mother told me," she added, which Michael found interesting: how could his mother pass along information that Michael could not yet accept? "I thought you might want to talk."

'To you?' Michael almost asked, before he remembered himself. And then he recalled that Phoebe's common-law husband had hanged himself from a closet rod two years ago. "I know what it's like," Phoebe continued. "Suddenly discovering something you should have noticed a long time ago. They go on to this better place, you know, which is what they wanted all along. But you and me, we're still left behind with all the questions they couldn't answer."

Michael remained silent. Was she still grieving, then, after two years? Was she suggesting that he had anything at all in common with her? He closed his eyes and felt himself shiver, in spite of his heavy coat. It wasn't true; it simply wasn't true. He had not known Phoebe's husband, but she couldn't have known him as well as he had known Emily.

'So well', Michael thought, 'that this would come out of the blue?'

He felt a stab of pain in his chest and realized that guilt came from all angles: from not being able to see his daughter's distress in the first place; from being so selfish that even now he focused on what Emily's suicide said about his parenting skills, and not about Emily herself.

"What do I do?" he murmured, unaware he'd spoken aloud until he heard Phoebe's answer.

"You survive," she said.

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"Webster's says [truth] it's the real state of things, the body of real events or facts." Jordan shrugged. "Then again, Oscar Wilde said that the pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple. Truth, you see, is in the eye of the beholder."