She told me about her marriage, which was tired but not broken, and her work, which she loved and resented, and her daughter — my granddaughter, Wren, who was six and shy and, Robin said, exactly like me, which I had not known and which sat in my chest like a coal all the rest of that day.

Exactly like me. I turned that over for a week.

I had met Wren six times in six years, always at holidays, always briefly, a small watchful girl who hid behind her mother’s leg and would not be coaxed, and I had privately decided she did not care for me and had felt, God forgive me, a little relieved, because I did not know what to do with a small girl any more than I had known what to do with my own small girl forty years before.

And now Robin was telling me the child hid because she was shy, the specific shyness of a person who feels everything and shows nothing, who watches a room a long time before she trusts it — and that this was not a rejection of me but a description of me, that my granddaughter and I were the same closed careful animal, and that I had spent six years reading my own reflection as a snub.