“One is a piece of news.

The other is in that box.

Let me give you the news first, because I have been looking forward to it for weeks.

I had come, over those months, to love these two women in the particular way you love the people who stood beside you at the worst and best moment of your life and asked nothing for it.

Margaret had handled Nora’s estate with a fierce, precise integrity, treating a delivery driver she had never met as though his interests were the only ones that mattered, which, legally, they were, and which almost no one in her position would have bothered to honor so completely.