Margaret stepped aside. The living room was spare and clean: a beige sofa, a bookshelf heavy with novels and gardening manuals, a single framed photograph on a side table of a younger Margaret standing on a rocky shore with a man whose face was turned partly away. Helen did not need to see the profile to know the set of the shoulders. Robert had always stood like that near water, as if the horizon were a problem he intended to solve.
They sat. The dog settled with a sigh. Somewhere a clock ticked with the patience of objects that outlast revelations.
"I found your letters," Helen said.
Margaret nodded once. "I wondered if he kept them. I asked him not to. Asking Robert not to do something was always a kind of prayer."
"He left you the house."
"I know." Margaret's hands folded in her lap, a gesture so like Helen's own that Diane, had she been there, might have flinched. "His lawyer called me the day after the reading. I told him I didn't want it. He said wanting wasn't the point. The will was the point."
Helen studied her. The nurse story dissolved and reformed into something harder to hold. "You were never from the agency."
"No. I trained as a nurse in my twenties. I left the work when my mother got sick. When Robert needed care, he called me because he knew I would come, and because he knew I already knew how to keep a secret that looked like compassion. I lied to you. I am sorry for that in a way that doesn't repair anything."