Every previous attempt anybody had made to set me up had come with an atmosphere of gentle urgency, of a widower being helped along.

Pamela did the opposite.

It was four months before she came to the house.

It was seven before she met Hannah, and that was at a pancake restaurant, on a Saturday, for fifty minutes, at her suggestion, because she said a nine-year-old should not have a stranger appear in her kitchen.

She said, that first year, a number of things that I still think were true when she said them.

She said she was not going to try to be Hannah’s mother, and that anyone who tried that was doing it for themselves.