End of Part One.

Part Two

Chapter 11 — Sundays

The Sundays lasted three weeks.

I want to be honest about how it happened, because when people hear the story they assume there was a conversation, and there wasn’t. There was a Sunday in November when Ava fell asleep at four in the afternoon on the rug in front of my fireplace, and Sabrina looked at me from the couch and said, “Is it all right if I don’t wake her?”

And I said what any woman with a spare room would say.

They stayed the night. Then they stayed the next weekend, both nights. Then the man Sabrina was renting from in Kittery raised the rent by ninety dollars, and she came on a Thursday with two bags instead of one, and by the first week of December there was a crib in my back bedroom and a high chair in my kitchen and Ava’s clothes in the dresser I had emptied twenty years earlier.

Nobody decided it. That’s what I’ve come to understand about the whole thing. It simply filled the shape that was already there.