I have thought about why she sat in his chair to do it, the chair no one was allowed to sit in, the chair she had walked visitors around for four years.

I think it was the only place in the house she could imagine being held.

Albert was the one who would have made her write that letter years sooner; a patient man married to a proud woman spends a lot of his marriage gently talking her down from her own hills, and when he died she lost not just her husband but her translator, the person who could reach her when the pride had her, and nineteen years of estrangement with a daughter is partly, I came to believe, nineteen years of missing the one man who’d have known how to say call her, Enid, just call her, being right isn’t worth this. He couldn’t say it anymore.

So she’d stayed on the hill alone.