“It was all done properly, with her attorney, while she was clear and well.

The trust is entirely independent.

Arthur has no legal claim over any of it, and as far as we know, he has no idea it exists.” I nodded, not really taking in the legal shape of it yet, only the enormous human fact at the center: that in the last clear weeks of her life, when most people turn inward, when a dying person might be forgiven for thinking only of themselves, Nora had thought not about her own son, who had abandoned her, but about a stranger’s sick mother in a city she had never seen, and had reached across the boundary of her own death to save two people she owed absolutely nothing.

That was the detail that undid me most, once I could think clearly enough to feel it.