“You looked like you belonged to somebody,” she said. “And I understood that if I knocked on that door I would be doing it for me. So I sat there for a while and then I drove home.”

I have replayed that a great deal. I have decided it is the single most decent thing my mother ever did, and that it does not begin to touch the ledger, and that both of those are permanently true.

I stood up to go.

“Emily.” She didn’t get up. “I’m not going to ask you for anything. I know what the answer is and I’d rather not make you say it.”

“That’s good,” I said. “Because the answer is no.”

“I know.”