“There’s a house on Alder Street with a maple tree,” I said.

“You’ll have the room over the driveway.

You’ll go to the same school and you’ll be on the same bus route and you’ll keep the same friends, and every other weekend and half of every holiday you’ll be here with Dad in this house.”

“So we have two houses.”

“You have two houses.”

She thought about it.

Then she said, “Is Grandma still my grandma?”

And that one I had not prepared for, and it took the legs out from under me, because it is the question underneath the question — because what a nine-year-old actually wants to know is how far the collapse goes and where it stops.