Word for word.” I told him.

And my brother, forty-four years old, a grown man with a mortgage and a family, made a sound I will never forget — a short, cracked exhale, like something giving way under a weight it had held too long.

“She had my boy for a week in the fall,” he said.

“In the fall, Marlena.

She kept telling him strong boys don’t ask for seconds.

I thought — I told myself she was just being old-fashioned.