Her voice had grown fainter over the afternoon, and her eyes had drifted toward the lake, where the late sun lay across the surface in a sheet of moving gold.

“It’s so calm.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen it so calm.”

“It is, Mom,” I said.

She turned her head slowly and looked at me, and then she looked past me to Juliet, who had come to sit on her other side, and her eyes moved between the two of us, her son and her husband’s daughter, the family that should never have been divided and had found its way together at the very end of everything.

Her face held a quiet and complete peace that no specialist, no equipment, no amount of money I had ever spent could have purchased for her.