"How long?" Helen asked. The question belonged to every betrayal she had ever read about and never expected to own.
Margaret did not look away. "On and off for thirty-four years. There were years we didn't speak. There were years we spoke too much. I was never his wife. I was never going to be. He loved you. That sentence is true and also insufficient, which is the problem with true sentences about complicated men."
Helen felt something in her chest rearrange itself — not break, not heal, rearrange, like furniture moved in a room you still have to live in. "Why the house?"
"Because he thought I had nowhere." Margaret's voice thinned. "My lease ends in the spring. The duplex is being sold. He knew. He worried in that practical way of his, the way he worried about furnace filters and expired warranties. He said the house on Maple had always been big enough for more than one kind of life. I told him that was the cruelest thing he had ever said to me, and also possibly the kindest. He laughed. Then he got the cancer, and laughing became a different sport."
Helen stood and walked to the bookshelf because sitting had become a form of agreement she was not ready to sign. Titles stared back: Middlemarch, a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, a paperback mystery with a cracked spine. Ordinary. Painfully ordinary. "Diane wants to contest the will."
"I would understand if she did."
"I haven't decided if I will let her." Helen turned. "I am seventy-two years old. I have a widow's Social Security and a life insurance payment and a daughter who looks at me as if I might shatter if she speaks too loudly. The house is the only place that still smells like the marriage I believed I had. And you — you brought him lemon candies and taught me how to turn him without hurting his hip while knowing his body in ways I am trying very hard not to imagine."
Margaret closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were wet. "I can refuse the bequest. There are forms. The lawyer mentioned them. The house would go to you as if the line had never existed."