Between the three, my mother sat on the kind of quiet, unglamorous security that a great many people spend their whole lives trying and failing to build, and never quite reach.

She had built it.

It was hers, in her name, the product of thirty years.

And Gavin knew about every piece of it.

I thought back over the eight months of his courtship, the flowers and the dinners and the church pews, and I saw it all again in a colder light.

The attentiveness had not been affection.

It had been reconnaissance.

He had been taking inventory the whole time, learning exactly what she had and exactly where it was, the way I had once been trained to survey a site before an operation.