And every time she’d started to say something, she had stopped herself with the phrase that every bystander uses, the phrase that sounds so much like wisdom and is really only fear wearing wisdom’s coat: it isn’t my place.

It’s their marriage.

Who am I to interfere. She had been polite.

She had been respectful of boundaries.

She had minded her own business right up until the morning her daughter called her from a car that wasn’t stopping, and then there had been no more business left to mind.

That was why she was still watching hallways from a wheelchair at the end of her life, she said — not waiting to die, but waiting, one last time, to catch the thing she’d missed before.