Now there are coffee rings on the patio table and my grandchildren’s toys underfoot and Anouk’s cheerful voice carrying from the kitchen, and it is the warmest and truest place I know.

I have learned, at seventy-four, some things it should not take a man a near-murder to learn.

That loneliness is a real and serious danger, not a weakness to be ashamed of, and that the answer to it is not the first beautiful stranger who offers a flattering look, but the patient, unglamorous love of the people who were there all along.

That my children’s honesty, which had wounded my vanity, was worth infinitely more than Dulce’s flattery, which had soothed it.

And that the small kindness I once did a struggling young woman, expecting nothing, turned out to be the thread my whole life hung by — which has taught me that how we treat the people beneath us in the world’s cruel arithmetic is not a minor thing but perhaps the truest measure of us, and sometimes the only thing that saves us.

Bess would have known all of this.