When you have been carrying a household alone, grieving and working and parenting all at once with no one to divide the weight, the arrival of someone who seems willing to share the load is not just welcome.

It is intoxicating.

It answers a hunger so deep you did not know how deep it was until someone offered to fill it.

And children feel that hunger too, which is part of what made the whole thing so effective.

Hannah had lost her mother; of course some part of her longed for a mother’s presence again, and of course that longing made her, like me, more willing to accept and less willing to question.

Brenda understood both hungers, mine and my daughter’s, and she fed them both enough to keep us compliant, the warmth doled out in careful measures, always sufficient to keep hope alive, never so generous that it became real.