"She's here?"

Cora walked forward at the sound: the hard 'R', the low insistence, the undertones that suggested a more common background. It was her mother. Mother. She could hear her mother's soft shuffling dress from the distance.

"Yes, Mother. Yes, I'm here." Cora felt her legs begin to move, then rush, then run. She pushed past Robert. "Mother? Mother, I'm here."

There was nothing around her, it all faded away. Eleven months of separation, eleven months of letters in which Cora confided tentatively at first, but then whole-heartedly at last. There was nothing left but the child-like urge to fall into her mother's arms, to hold her, to grasp at her sleeves and to bury her head in her dress. In a desperate collision, Cora found her, and she embraced her. Hard. She thought she'd collapse there, in the arms that she'd cried in only several times before, but the arms that held and warmed her nonetheless. Martha's hold could make her believe that everything would be alright. Martha always seemed to know that everything would end for the better – she was the rock of their family. She was their anchor. But not this time. No. Not this time. For Martha was crying, and at the sound, Cora began to tremble.

"Mother?" she whispered into Martha's red curls. They were rough on Cora's cheek, unwashed and untidy, and the citrus scent that always lingered in her mother's hair was absent. "Shh. It's alright. I'm here now. I'm here."

"He asked and asked for you, Cora. He wanted to tell you. To speak to you -"

Cora squeezed her eyes. "I know. I tried to come."

"- He wanted so much for you to know. He wanted to see you."

"Robert wouldn't let me." Cora gripped her mother's black sleeve. Her throat was still raw, the words coming out in jagged, struggling syllables. "I begged, Mother. Robert wouldn't let me come. He wouldn't."

Martha's small, but sure hands slowly pushed Cora away and held her there, at a distance. Cora could feel their steadiness, though she continued to tremble beneath them. What? What had she said? Why would her mother stare at her that way? Cora studied the pale face of her mother. She looked at the way her mother furrowed her brows, the way her teary blue eyes narrowed in what seemed like slight confusion, then concern, and the way she moved them beyond Cora and nodded.

For some reason, a reason Cora was not quite sure of herself, she felt angry. It flared inside her chest, but in its wake, something else stirred. It was sorrow. And then, loneliness.

Martha, bringing her gaze back to Cora, brushed a soft hand over Cora's cheek, drying tears that had dampened her skin. She pressed it lightly, a gesture of affection. "Come upstairs."

Cora laid beside her mother in her parents' bed, the piles of covers and blankets pulled all around her, her mother's fingers on her hair.

"...and are you still bleeding?"

She shook her head numbly, images of three weeks ago, nearly four now, burning away in her mind after recounting it all again. She'd not said it aloud. She'd not told anyone aloud, not the doctor, not Violet. No one. Of course, why would she have? They had witnessed it. And now, she had witnessed it again, for the thousandth time. She just wanted to stop thinking about it. She just wanted to stop thinking about all of it.

"Robert did telegram, Cora."

Cora's chest felt too heavy to respond. She closed her eyes.

"Cora..."

"Was Father in pain?"

Martha was quiet, the stroking of Cora's hair stopped.

Cora maneuvered herself beside her mother; she propped herself so she could see her better. She began to shake her head before the words could come. "I would've been here weeks ago. Weeks!"

Martha pressed her lips, nodding silently.

"I begged Mother." Cora felt the tears come again. "I begged him. Daily. He knew..." The tears were coming faster now, her words were starting to slur and yet Cora couldn't stop. She didn't want to stop. Not this. She had told no one. She'd told no one, and her mother was quiet and listening, her eyes red from crying, but clear in attentiveness. "I wanted so much to see Father. To tell him. To apologize. To read to him from..." Cora sighed, then pulled in a wet breath. "...whatever book he was reading now..."

"Robinson Crusoe," Martha's voice was quiet, very quiet. "He didn't like it."

"But Robert..." And as if of its own accord, her head fell again to her mother's lap, her sobs shaking her shoulders. "...And I lost the baby anyhow. I lost my baby and now..." She pulled in more hard breaths, trying to calm herself, but trying in vain. "I don't think I would have, you know? If he had just let me come."

Martha's voice sounded strange, distant and strained, at her response. "Don't. Stop, Cora."

But Cora's thoughts were black and cold. Her heart hurt, a physical, throbbing pain. "I can't..." she managed, and felt her mother's other hand on her back, rubbing it. She heard her mother begin to cry as well, and oddly it soothed her. Robert had not cried with her. Robert never cried with her. He never showed any emotion. Why did he never show any emotion?

"And yet I love him, Mother. Why? Why do I love him?"

The words were said before she could stop them, and she felt selfish at the sound of them. Her father was dead. Her father had been buried only five days ago. Her Levinson family were gathered downstairs, having not seen her in months and months, and yet she could not stop the words that came from her mouth.

"I'm sorry, Mother. I'm so sorry. I shouldn't talk about myself."

And just as Martha did before, she rubbed her back and cried along with her.

She made her way down the steps, in her stockinged feet, and through the foyer, going into dark blue of the sitting room. Upon entering, she cast her eyes around the space and took them all in. All were crouched low, some on stools, some on the floor, but the scene was the same as it had been those years ago in Cincinnati. A group all in their wrinkled black clothes, a torn piece of the fabric above their hearts. All shoeless, they tucked their feet beneath them: beloved Aunt Ruth, her husband Frank; distant Uncle Tobias and Aunt Annele, their dark-haired daughter, Hanna. Harold, who sat on the floor beside Savta. And Robert.

"Pretty Cora. Our pretty Cora!" Aunt Ruth stood and stretched out her arms, coming to Cora. Cora watched her come, her black dress stained at the lap where she must have spilled something on it days ago – Cora knew she had not changed, her words from Saba's sitting room a decade ago echoing around her head. It's proper mourning, Cora. For us. For the Jewish.

She let Aunt Ruth take her in and hold her for a moment, Cora tentatively returning the gesture. She sensed the others clamoring to stand from where they were on the floor, Uncle Tobias groaning and muttering something in Hebrew that Cora did not understand. But what she could understand were Aunt Ruth's words that she spoke against her hair.

"'God knows how we are fashioned, God remembers that we are dust./ The days of mortals are like grass; We flourish as the flowers of the field.'"

Aunt Ruth's words strangled and stirred inside Cora's throat. "Aunt Ruth," she whispered, then cleared the irritation. She felt her aunt release her and she greeted her father's family. She embraced the tall, broad form of her father's older brother, Tobias. She crouched down to where her grandmother sat, on the floor, and kissed her soft, thin cheek. Savta's fingers trembled as she brought them to Cora's face, patting her cheek, her elderly grandmother's head shaking slightly when she leant in to kiss hers in turn. She'd not touched so many people since she left America. The only person who ever touched her was Robert.

"Isi's girl," Savta said softly, her voice as tremulous as her aged fingers. "Cora. How proud he was of you. How proud we are."

Cora knelt before her, her words bringing her to her knees. "Oh, Savta..." she shook her head. If only she knew. Father wasn't proud. He wasn't.

"And Iyshah – your husband. Kind, Cora. God has blessed you." Her shaky hand stretched beyond Cora and Cora peered over her shoulder at who she beckoned. She pressed her lips as Robert came near and as he hesitantly took her grandmother's hand, he too crouching before her. Cora could smell the cinnamon of his scent, and it suddenly felt suffocating. "May God bless you in numbers and numbers, as He has done me. Numbers and numbers, child."

Cora didn't even remember breaking away from her, she didn't even sense what she was doing until she was across the room and in the foyer again, away from them all. She wiped her tears from her cheeks furiously, and she looked at the scene she had left.

Robert was standing again, nodding in whispers to her aunt, Ruth, and her uncle, Frank. She watched as he furrowed his brows and looked to where she had escaped and she frowned as he turned. How did it not hurt him? How did Savta's words not sting him as they had done her?

Cora watched and watched, even as Harold came closer, letting her eyes roam over her husband standing those twenty feet away. She saw as he pulled the bottom of his waistcoat. She saw as he lifted her chin. She heard him quietly clear his throat. All these things she knew were his nervous habits. She'd learned the signs of his discomfort. Her gaze ended at his feet, in his socks, his shoes having been discarded and put elsewhere. He looked around him, perhaps for her, and she knew he was as perplexed and slightly as alarmed as she had been when she was twelve, sitting for her grandfather.

Harold whispered her name when he came near, holding out a letter to her. "Here."

Cora glanced down to it, and then to her brother, taking it in her hands.

"Mother isn't doing well, Cora. She stays in her room. She doesn't eat."

Robert was closer now, craning his neck slightly to peer down into Cora's face.

Cora fought the urge to square her jaw, and instead ignored him, looking down into the letter and easing herself to the floor. The warmth of Robert's hand was suddenly on her arm, "No, my darling, sit in a chair. Sit here. Be comfortable."

She could only shake her head. Did she really need to explain it again? "No chairs, Robert. We've been made low by grief."

She sensed as he leaned toward her, though she did not look. She could see out of her periphery that he glanced back into and around the room, at the small clusters of her father's family that spread out around the furnished room. A darker part of her wanted to laugh – what she was sure was thousands of dollars worth of chairs and settees, rendered perfectly needless.

"But," he whispered in her ear, "you aren't Jewish. You have a reason to be easy on yourself-"

For the second time that day, Cora felt anger between her lungs. "This isn't for me, Robert. This is for Father. Please!" She could hear Harold say her name lowly, as if reproachingly. But she shook her head dismissively and looked at the words written across the paper. Her mouth parted at the words she read. "She's coming here?"

"Tomorrow."

"Who's this?" Robert stepped closer to her, his arm brushing her shoulder as he read the words she held.

"Oh, God," Cora sighed, reading the words again. "Does she know we're respecting Jewish mourning, then? I can't imagine she knows quite what to do. We don't quite know, and it was our father."

"You know her, she never feels uneasy anywhere she goes. Where do you think Mother gets it from?"

Cora pouted her lip slightly with a small lift of her brow. That was true.

"Who? Who is coming?"

Cora let Harold take the letter from her. "GranMary," he answered as he creased it again. "She's due to arrive in the morning."

"I apologize. Mary? GranMary?"

Cora looked over at her husband, her husband of a year, and furrowed her brows. "Mary, Robert." His expression did not change. "My mother's mother. The one I'm named for. Cora Marion."

She watched as his features fell into recognition and then quick regret. "Oh, oh, yes. Of course. Mary."

Cora only rolled her eyes and pushed past him again, muttering under her breath as she went. "You'd know if you ever listened to anything – anything – I said. Anything. Ever."