Logan said, “Not yet, buddy.”

“When are you going to tell her?”

“Soon. It’s complicated. Come on.”

The doors closed.

Aunt Hannah.

That is what got me.

Not your wife. Not Hannah. Somebody had given that child a word for me, and the word they had chosen was aunt, and it was a word designed to fit into a future in which somebody else was standing in the other position.

Rosalba took the plate out of my hand and put it down and said, “Siéntate,” and I sat on an upturned crate in a service pantry for two minutes, and then I got up and went back to work, because the alternative was to walk into that room, and I understood — with total clarity, one of the few pieces of genuine judgment I exercised that night — that if I walked into that room I would spend the rest of my life being the woman who ruined Gertrude’s birthday.