I studied that list for weeks, at first as a set of restrictions to be resented and gradually as a document that told me everything about the woman who’d written it.

Every rule was a fear or a grief with the feelings filed off. Her chair is not to be sat in — a widow protecting the last physical place her husband had been. No one in the house she hasn’t met — a woman alone, keeping herself safe in the only way she could. The good scissors come back to the second drawer — a person whose entire sense of control over a life that had taken her husband and scattered her children came down to knowing where things were.

The rules were not really about me.

They were the load-bearing walls of a self that had lost most of its other supports, and I came to handle them with a care that surprised me, returning the scissors to the second drawer not because I feared her but because I understood, without being told, that every small order I kept was a small reassurance I was giving her: the world is not entirely out of your hands; someone is respecting the shape you’ve built to survive inside.