Javier advised against it, and my brother thought it was a mistake, and they were probably both right.

But there was a question underneath all the others that I could not put down: how a woman who had held my hands across a table, who had remembered my patients’ names and asked after my mother’s knee, could have been measuring me the whole time for a coffin.

I did not expect an answer that would satisfy me.

I think I went because I needed to look at the real thing directly, without the warmth painted over it, so that some part of me would stop searching old memories for the version of her that had loved me.

That version had never existed.