Brooks and I flew to St. Louis from New York to attend the funeral for Tucker’s 3-month-old baby boy who died of SIDS two days before. His name was Finbar, but in my head, he will always be “Finn,” the nickname our crew assigned to him. We assured our friend Tucker that the nickname might help her son endure less teasing when he started school, something he never got to do.

The wall of heat hit us as soon as we landed. That specific kind of midwestern heat sticks to your skin, a visceral reminder you are nowhere near a coast, that no relief of a breeze is coming.

Our friend group includes 11 girls, and while women is the more accurate word, I still think of us as girls because we’ve known each other since college. And from the day we graduated from DePauw University and moved out of the

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