That she had simply been the only person in our house willing to say so out loud, and that in ten years I would understand.

Her cousin said, on the phone, that blended families are hard and everybody makes mistakes in the first years.

I said blended families are extremely hard, and that I had been perfectly willing to do the work, and that what happened at Pine Crest was not a mistake in a hard process.

It was the outcome the process had been heading toward for eighteen months.

I answered exactly once, in writing, through the family attorney who handled Rebecca’s estate, and the operative sentence was hers, not mine.

Mr.