I had made her feel, in her last months, like a person worth showing up for, rather than a problem to be managed and kept quiet.

She wrote that she knew about my mother.

She knew about Evelyn, knew she was sick, knew how hard I was fighting for her, though I never once could work out how she had learned it, unless the answer was simply that she had paid the kind of close, loving attention to me that no one had paid in years.

She wrote that three months earlier she had gone to her attorney and set up a private trust, entirely separate from anything of Arthur’s, and that she wanted me to have it.