It was, I think, the most generous thing anyone has ever done for me.

She used her last clear window not to settle her own affairs, not to make peace with her own long life, but to reach across the space between us and hand me back a version of myself I had stopped believing in.

Two days later, the facility called.

Nora had passed away peacefully in her sleep, in the night, without pain and without struggle, simply gone in the quiet hours the way the gentlest deaths come.

I stood in my kitchen holding the phone with the stacked bills in front of me, and I wept for a woman I had been hired to deceive, wept as hard as I have ever wept for anyone, and it was only standing there with the tears coming that I fully understood what she had become to me, and what I had lost.