What matters is that a woman I had loved like a mother had been putting something in my tea, every morning, for a very long time, and smiling while she watched me drink it.

You have to understand what those ten years had been, to understand what the whisper broke.

When my own mother died, in my second year of college, I thought I had lost the last person who would ever tend me — and then I married Darius, and his mother folded me into her life so completely that I let myself believe I had been given a second one.

Ottoline came to our wedding and cried harder than anyone.

When Esme was born she moved in “just for the newborn months” and simply never left, and I was glad, God help me, I was glad, because a woman raising a child wants her mother near and mine was in the ground.

I paid for her medications without being asked and never mentioned it.