That is the ordinary way of things; children grow up and move away, and no one can be blamed for building a life.

But there is a difference between building a life and closing a door, and over the years I watched that difference reveal itself, slowly, in the spaces where the phone did not ring.

They visited rarely.

Sometimes they called.

Sometimes not even that.

A birthday would pass, then a holiday, and Fiona would sit by the window in the afternoon light with her hands folded, not saying anything, and I would watch her not saying it and understand exactly what the silence held.

She never phoned them to complain.

She never guilted them.

She simply waited, the way she had waited out droughts and hard winters her whole life, with a patience that looked like peace from the outside and was, I came to understand, something much lonelier than peace.

In the end, when she could no longer manage on her own, it was our house she came to.

My husband’s, and mine.

It made a kind of sense on paper — we had the room, we were nearest, my husband was her son.

But paper does not do the bathing and the feeding and the sitting up at three in the morning, and everyone at that first family meeting understood, without anyone saying it aloud, that when they agreed Fiona should come live with us, what they were really agreeing was that she would become my job.

They looked relieved.