Then my mother-in-law said, in the pleasant voice, the one she uses at church:

“Well.

If she’d taken proper care of herself back then, that baby would be alive today.”

I put both hands flat on the counter.

Nine years.

The exact sentence.

Word for word, unchanged, out on a landing to a woman she had known for three months, at seventy years old, at her own birthday party — a sentence she had clearly said so many times, in so many rooms, that it came out of her fully formed, like a hymn.

Valerie did not answer her.