"Would you?"
"If you ask me to."
Helen heard the offer and understood its weight: not generosity alone, but the last possible gift a mistress can give a wife — the chance to erase the evidence. She also heard, beneath it, the exhaustion of a woman who had lived thirty-four years in the margins and was being asked, one more time, to make herself smaller for someone else's peace.
"I need time," Helen said.
"Take it." Margaret rose when Helen moved toward the door. The brown dog lifted its head. "Helen — for what it's worth — he talked about you constantly. Not as a problem. As a fact. The way people talk about weather and gravity and the year they were born. You were the ground. I was the weather. That doesn't make either of us imaginary."
Helen paused with her hand on the knob. "Don't come to the house. Not yet. Not until I know what kind of woman I am going to be about this."
"I won't," Margaret said.
Diane did not take the news of the visit well. She took it standing in Helen's kitchen with her coat still on, keys still in her fist, the posture of a person prepared to leave before she arrived.