he reminded her. On the day of the funeral, it rained. Sam and Miles sat in the back of the church, and though Miles couldn’t follow a word of the ceremony or the conversations, he gathered that it was a family-and-close-friends-only affair, and that he and Sam were permitted but not expected to be there. They left immediately after the service—Sam had sent flowers, and the last thing they wanted was to be at a party getting hammered on ouzo while Stephan’s relatives disparaged his tastes in women. And anyway, Mabel had fallen asleep and Miles had to carry her out. But Jon followed them out, shooing his retinue back inside the church. He had gone alarmingly soft in the two weeks that had passed: his mild heart attack on the helicopter, coupled with the dehydration and undiagnosed high blood pressure, meant that his stay in the hospital was prolonged to five days while the doctors tried different blood pressure medications, because Jon couldn’t stand the side effects of the three most common ones. Eventually they got the mix right, and though they told him to exercise and not to stop working, the shock of his near-death and Stephan’s death caused him to close the store. Sam and Miles had both gone to see him, but the store and the apartment were both shuttered. It frightened Sam to think that the change might be permanent. “Samantha, Miles,”
