Stephanie Austin had a complicated father and a complicated relationship with him. His death, after a short battle with lung cancer, forced her to reckon with his always-threatened and now permanent absence from her life. Then the health of her grandmother, with whom she had always been close, began to fail, and she faced another looming loss, intensified by the bewildering early months of the pandemic. sits us at the bedside inside the sickroom with Stephanie Austin, and reminds us that the histories of our loves-the kindnesses and the disappointments too-sit with us in that final room.