I want to be honest about that woman, the one who kept the peace, because it would be easy to pretend she never existed — to tell you I was always the person who called an attorney from a hospital bed.

I was not.

For five years I had been shrinking.

It happened so gradually I never caught it happening, the way you don’t notice a room getting dark until you look up and can’t read.

I learned not to mention the trust at family dinners because it made Regan’s mouth go thin.

I learned to laugh off Ian’s little corrections of me in front of his friends, because making a thing of it would have been “dramatic,” and being dramatic was the worst thing a Prentice woman could be.