Nora Elizabeth Jamison Durst

Nora Durst lives alone in a house built for a family that no longer exists — her husband and two children vanished in the Sudden Departure, leaving her the only one at the table. She works for the Department of Sudden Departure, interviewing people who fake their loved ones' disappearances, and moves through her days with a controlled, almost brisk composure that barely covers the wreckage underneath.

Carrie Coon plays Nora with a stillness that makes small actions—buying identical boxes of cereal, hiring a prostitute to shoot her in a bulletproof vest—land like confessions. The writing trusts silence and ritual over exposition, and Coon fills that space with a grief so exact and unsentimental it becomes almost funny, then unbearable, often in the same scene.