Are you taking care of yourself.

I never told my mother, in those early months, how much those small questions cost me, how each one opened a door onto that quiet room at St.

Jude’s and the woman who had asked me the very same things.

I did not want to burden Evelyn with my grief for someone she had never met.

But I think she understood anyway, the way mothers understand, because one afternoon she simply took my hand and said that she wished she could have thanked Nora herself, and that she hoped, wherever she was, Nora could see the good her kindness had done.

We spoke of her often after that, the two of us, this woman who had bound our little family together without ever setting foot in it.