“Don’t start with your endless accounting, Gwen.

My mother only turns seventy once.

And you always figure out a way to make it work.”

“What if I don’t figure it out this time?” I asked.

I asked it softly, almost gently, and I meant it as a real question — perhaps the first real question I had asked him in years.

“Then you’ll show everyone what kind of daughter-in-law you are,” Brandon snapped, and hung up.

I set the phone down on the counter, and I noticed that my hands were perfectly steady, and I understood, in that steadiness, that some decision had already been made somewhere below the level of my thinking, and that all that remained was for the rest of me to catch up to it.