I was overjoyed, in those months, to meet Rosa — the woman with the dreams and the choir and the shy sweetness about a man who saved her peaches.

Every story she told me was a treasure.

But underneath the joy ran a terrible sorrow, which was this: that I was meeting this extraordinary woman for the first time in the last months of her life, when I could have known her for all of it.

She had been there the whole time.

For thirty years, the woman who had wanted to be a teacher, who had sung, who had loved and lost and hoped, had been standing right in front of me, wearing the apron I had reduced her to, and I had never once asked her a single question that might have let her out.

The tragedy was not only that I nearly missed her dying.