She became a kind of presence in the house, not a sad one, but a warm one, the unseen grandmother whose love still moved through the rooms she had paid for.

The exact questions Nora used to ask, in the mouth of the mother Nora had given back to me.

I noticed it constantly, in those first months in the house, the way the two women had begun to rhyme in my mind, the one gone and the one saved.

They had never met.

They would never meet.

And yet Nora’s care lived on in my mother’s recovered ordinary tenderness, in every are you eating enough and come sit down and you work too hard, as though a certain kind of love had simply been handed from one woman to the other across the boundary of death, the way a runner passes a baton without breaking stride.

I would hear my mother ask if I was sleeping, and for half a second I would be back in that quiet room at St.