Christopher had given me years before — a picture of the two of us, and Lucas as a baby, taken one summer afternoon in the orchard, all three of us squinting and laughing in the sun.

Eighteen years of a life, in one box I could carry under one arm.

I pushed open the heavy front double doors — the front doors, which in eighteen years I had almost never used, because the housekeeper comes and goes through the service entrance at the side — and I stepped out into the cool evening air, and the doors swung shut behind me with a heavy, final sound.

And standing there on the marble steps, in the gathering dusk, with my whole life in a box, a wave of pure terror washed over me, colder than the evening air.

Because the shame I had felt in the library was nothing next to the fear that arrived now, plain and practical and enormous.

I was fifty-eight years old.