Each of these was a threshold, and I crossed each one carefully, and I never, ever reached for more than she offered.

And then one morning I made a mistake.

I was helping her into her cardigan, and my fingers brushed, by accident, across her shoulder blade — the lightest touch, half a second — and Edith Ledbetter came up out of that chair like she’d been shocked, and her hand closed around my wrist in a grip that a seventy-six-year-old woman should not have been able to make.

I looked at her face, and what I saw there stopped my breath.