I also said yes because it was easy.

That is the part I have had to sit with.

A guest cottage is the version of taking somebody in that requires nothing of you.

Corinne moved in in the April.

By the October I am describing, she had been on that property for eighteen months.

In that time she had, by increments so small that not one of them was worth an argument, become the person who ran the house.

She rearranged the pantry.