And Sarah, I was about to learn, had done something even quieter and even braver.

They were not obligated to keep visiting us.

The work was done; the files were closed.

And yet here they were, in my garden, on an ordinary spring afternoon, because somewhere along the way the four of us and the memory of Nora had become a kind of family, assembled not out of blood but out of the simple fact of having all, each in our own way, chosen to do right by one good old woman.

That, I was beginning to understand, was how the real thing gets built.