For seventeen months I had been building a whole future on a foundation, and in the space of a single dropped suitcase the foundation simply was not there, had never been there, had been a painted backdrop the whole time.

Everything I thought I knew about the person standing in my foyer rearranged itself at once into something colder and more deliberate, and I had to hold very still against the sensation of the floor tilting, because there was a woman on the ground who needed me to keep my footing.

Chapter 2 — Thirteen Years

To understand what that scene did to me, you have to understand who Teresa was, and how long she had been part of my family’s life.

She had come to work for us thirteen years earlier, when I was still learning the business from my father, and in all that time she had become something far more than a name on a payroll.

When my mother went through her cancer treatments, it was Teresa who sat with her on the bad afternoons, who kept the house calm and warm while the rest of us came apart.

When my father died, it was Teresa who quietly kept the small machinery of his life in order, the correspondence and the accounts and the hundred practical things grief makes impossible, until we could stand up straight again.

She had been in the room for the worst days of my life and had met every one of them with steadiness and grace.

I had never once seen her frightened.

That is the thing I keep returning to.

Teresa was not a fragile woman; she had raised a son on her own, had weathered hard years, had a spine of quiet iron under her gentleness.

And she was shaking.

Her head came up when she heard my voice, and she looked at me, and the look on her face was one I had never seen there in thirteen years and hope never to see again on anyone I care about.

It was the look of a person who has begun to believe that no one is coming.