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THEY DON’T GET it either. Emma doesn’t want to be “saved.”

But at least they’ve got the world part right. Yes, try to save the world, she thinks. I’ll be cheering for you from … wherever I am.

Protests , texts this unknown person. Marches. Happening because of *you.*

Emma puts her phone back on the bedside table. This is what she wanted. She feels charged now. Electric. She knows she’s making a difference. Her death, unlike Claire’s, will mean something.

So now she can do what? Relax?

How is a person supposed to relax on the last night of their life?

The suicide rate for people ages twenty to twenty-four increased 63 percent from 2001 through 2021.

The global rich have more than they could ever consume, while a billion people struggle to get enough to eat.

She reaches for the remote. She’ll find a stupid movie and stare at it until her brain goes numb.

But instead her attention gets pulled to the fake watercolor on the wall, which shows a little yellow cottage beside a white picket fence.

On the other side of the fence, six puffy sheep dot a bright green meadow.

She realizes that she’s in the same room she shared with her mother when they came for Claire’s graduation.

Emma was ten years old, too tall and too bookish already.

Back then she couldn’t stop talking about going to Ridgemont herself.

She was a walking brochure for the place.

“Ridgemont Academy has an eight-to-one student-to-teacher ratio. The percentage of teachers holding an advanced degree is eighty-six. There are forty-five US states and territories represented in the student body, and thirty-eight countries. There are over a hundred student clubs and organizations on campus.”

Her mother, usually so patient, snapped at her. “Can’t you lay off the facts for a night? I haven’t slept in weeks!”

Emma blinked back tears as she sat next to her parents, listening to Claire’s valedictory speech about the importance of perseverance and having high expectations for yourself.

“When things get hard,” Claire told the assembled crowd, “you must not give up. When I felt like I couldn’t do any more homework, or any more violin practicing, or any more sprints, I’d say to myself, ‘What’s the matter?

It’s only pain .’ And pain, like my dad always told us, ‘is weakness leaving the body.’”

“That’s my girl,” Byron whispered.

That night they ate a celebratory steak dinner in Concord.

Then Claire headed back to the dorms, and Byron went back to Cambridge, and it was just Emma and her mother in the little pink motel room.

By tradition, her mother pulled a bottle of Chateau Lafite Rothschild and a bottle of sparkling cider from her suitcase and filled up two of the motel’s plastic cups.

Then Sarah Blake drained one cup and quickly poured herself another. Emma had never seen her mother drink more than half a glass of wine at a dinner party. She didn’t look like she was celebrating anymore.

“Mom?” Emma asked. “Do you want some water?”

“It isn’t easy,” Sarah said, almost to herself. “No, in fact it’s very hard.”

“What is?” Emma asked, suddenly worried.

Her mother shook her head. Took another gulp of wine. Stared dully at the watercolor sheep, which she said looked like wads of Kleenex with legs.

“Mom?” Emma scooted closer to her on the bed. “What’s so hard?”

“It’s hard to be the kind of person your father wants us to be,” Sarah said. “I’ve done it for twenty years, and I’m very, very tired.”

Little flares of alarm were going off inside Emma, but she didn’t know what to say or do. She was only in fourth grade. She reached for her mother’s hand. She said, helplessly, “Everything’s going to be okay!”

Her mother had laughed tonelessly, the sound harsh and low in the small room. “Of course everything is going to be okay, sweetheart. You’re going to go to Ridgemont. Your sister is going to Harvard. Your dad will continue to make more money than we can spend, and I’ll … I’ll…”

She’d waved her hand in the air, eyes cloudy with confusion.

“I’ll just keep being Mrs. Byron Blake.”

And her mother turned to Emma and put her hand against her cheek. Then she forced herself to smile. “But there will be good times for us, my dear, of course. So many of them.”

But Sarah Blake was dead less than four years later, so really, how many more good times did she get?