She smiled back at me with what looked exactly like affection, and I believed, in that moment, that she was simply a devoted sister-in-law holding up a grieving widow.

I did not understand that she had positioned herself at my elbow like a nurse at a bedside for a reason, that the offers to speak for me and to shoulder my burdens were not kindness but the opening moves of a long game, and that my sister-in-law was sitting beside me in that quiet room patiently waiting to claim everything I had.

It unsettles me still, how patient she was.

She did not reach for anything that morning.