Franny had not hidden a second life from me.

She had lived one openly, every weekday, and I had simply never come to look.

In forty-one years I had been inside that shop perhaps a dozen times, always to fetch her or drop something off, always with the engine running, and I had seen a small woman at a machine and thought there is my wife at her work, and gone home.

What I had not seen was the woman a man told about his diagnosis before he told his own children, because she would take it in over a hem and not make a thing of it.