One Sunday, she arrived at our house with a battered recipe box and a tin of homemade biscuits.

She wore a green scarf and insisted on washing the mixing bowl despite my protests.

“Claire Elizabeth,” she said, pretending to sound stern, “you cannot call me a guest forever.”

I laughed.

“You keep saying my middle name like I’m still eight.”

“Some habits take twenty-three years to outgrow.”

We baked lemon cake using a handwritten recipe stained with old butter marks.

Miriam showed me how she grated the zest before cutting the fruit and how she never measured the vanilla precisely.