"That is its own kind of staging."
"Yes," Evelyn said. "I am not suddenly a simple woman. I am only, at last, a definite one." She watched a bat miss nothing. "They will think someone stood over me with a pen."
"They will think it was me."
"I will write them a letter that says it was not. They may not believe a letter. Then they will have to believe the years, or they won't. I am not leaving you the job of being believed in advance. Belief can be their own work. Yours, until then, is the same as it was this morning. The drawer sticks. The wrist aches when it rains. Don't start packing, and don't start guarding. Live here as you have been living here."
Ruth was quiet long enough that a car passed and the grape leaves answered it. "And if it is not me?" she said. "If you have done something noble and sideways that still puts me on a sidewalk?"