And Susan said, “You know how she was.”

And I said, “No.

I know how she made tea.”

Susan put the piece in the bin and did not answer, and I have thought since that this was the single most informative exchange of that entire autumn and that neither of us understood it at the time.

Because Susan Henderson, on the fifteenth of October, in a kitchen, used the word secrets in the plural about a woman she had known for thirty-one years.

She knew there was something.