That should have been information.

Pamela Gable came into our lives two years before that afternoon.

She was thirty-eight, she worked in medical device sales out of Denver, and she seemed — I have gone over this several hundred times, and this is still the honest word — she seemed to understand.

She understood the interrupted dinners.

She understood a phone that had to stay on.

She understood that a man whose wife has died does not stop having had a wife.

And she was, as far as I could see, warm with my daughter.

She helped with a science fair project on erosion that involved four pounds of sand in my garage.

She went to a winter concert when I was stuck at Carson until nine.

She remembered that Hannah would not eat buttercream but would eat almost anything with strawberry in it, which is a thing I had to be told twice.

One night in my kitchen, drying a pan, she said: “I don’t want to replace her mother.

I want Hannah to know that loving me isn’t a thing she has to feel guilty about.”

I have thought about that sentence more than any other sentence anyone has said to me in my adult life.

It is a beautiful sentence.