She did not make it tender.

She made it brisk and slightly put-upon, narrating her own annoyance the whole time — “well, I can’t very well let you die up here, the nonprofit would have paperwork” — but she checked on me every few hours through two nights, an old woman climbing a creaking staircase she had trouble with, to lay her hand on the forehead of a girl she’d known six weeks.

On the third morning, the fever broken, I came downstairs weak and wrung-out, and there was a bowl of oatmeal at my place, and Enid was reading the paper and did not look up, and she said, “You had me up at all hours.

You’ll take the good vitamins from now on, they’re in the cabinet.” And I understood that something had shifted, that I had been let, without either of us discussing it, one room deeper into her house.