She was, I would learn, the last person my mother had trusted with any of this — a small-town banker of the old kind, who had known our family for decades and kept a promise for six years without ever once picking up the phone to hurry it along.

She got me a paper cup of water before she said anything of substance, and she waited until my hands were steady enough to hold it.

There was a gentleness in her that told me she had been dreading and rehearsing this conversation for a long time, and that she considered it a sacred sort of errand, the kind you do carefully because a dead woman is counting on you to do it right.

“Susanna,” she said.