For seven months, a young widow raising an infant alone had come into his home before seven every morning, cleaned rooms she could never afford to live in, and left again without complaint, and he had never once known that she had lost her husband.

He had walked past her in his own hallways dozens of times.

He had, on the rare occasions he addressed her at all, asked her to see to a closet or a set of tables.

And in all that time it had not occurred to him to know a single true thing about the person moving quietly through his house.

The word widowed sat on the page like an accusation, though it accused no one in particular, and Corbin felt something he was not accustomed to feeling in his own home, which was ashamed.