My mother drifted between waking and a light sleep, surfacing now and then to say something small — a comment about a bird on the water, a half-finished memory of a summer long ago, once a soft laugh at nothing either of us could see.

Juliet hummed something under her breath, a tune I did not know, and I understood after a while that it was a tune she must have hummed for my mother on the bad nights, in the months when I had not been in the room, and that my mother knew it and found it comforting, and that I was being allowed, now, at the end, into a circle of small private kindnesses I had done nothing to earn.

That was the grace of it, and I have tried to hold onto the lesson since: that the circle of my mother’s last comfort was one I was let into freely, despite having done nothing to deserve a place in it, by a sister who could have kept me out and a mother who had every reason to.

They did not make me earn my way back in.