But I had spent seven months watching this woman move my things without asking, decide my space without asking, carry my dead husband’s photographs to a freezing floor without asking.

And to hear her stand in my kitchen and ask, humbly, where I would like the eggs — to watch her wait for my answer, and honor it — was to watch a person who had once treated my whole life as hers to arrange finally understand that it had never been hers at all.

Six words.

Where would you like me to put these.

It was the sound of my mother, at seventy years old, finally learning how to knock on a door that had never once been hers.