I’ll drink it in a minute, I just need to sit.”

“Drink it while it’s hot.”

“I will.”

Evelyn stood in the doorway a beat too long.

“All right,” she said, and pulled the door most of the way shut.

Maya waited four minutes by the clock on the dresser.

Then she got up, moving as quietly as she was able, and poured the entire cup into the base of a spider plant on the windowsill, and put the cup back on the saucer with a half-inch left in the bottom, and lay down on top of the covers on her husband’s childhood bed with her eyes closed and her mouth slightly open.

Forty minutes later she heard the stairs.