I was asking a fifty-three-year-old widow to uproot her entire quiet life, leave her home and her town and her routines, and move across state lines to labor full-time in someone else’s household.

I framed it, in my mind, as accepting a gift she was glad to give.

And she was glad to give it.

But it was still an enormous thing to ask, and I asked it the way you ask a mother for anything — thoughtlessly, certain of the yes, without ever weighing the cost to her.

I did not know there was a cost I could not see.

But I also never looked.