"No."
"Did you ever meet her before she started coming to the house?"
"No. The agency sent her. Or I thought the agency sent her. Robert arranged it. He said a friend from the firm recommended someone gentle."
Diane set the photograph down carefully, as if the glass might break under the weight of what it no longer proved. "We need to find out who she is."
Helen folded the will closed. The manila folder accepted it the way a mouth accepts a bitter pill. "I don't want to know."
"Mom."
"I mean it." Helen's hands trembled once and then steadied, the old discipline returning. "If I know, I have to do something with the knowing. If I don't know, I can still believe he loved this house the way I loved it. I can still believe forty-one years meant what I thought they meant."
Diane looked at her mother — at the black cardigan, at the silver hair, at the woman who had ironed Robert's shirts and remembered his mother's birthday and sat through every school play and every hospital night with the same quiet competence — and understood that grief had just acquired a second door, and that door opened onto a hallway Helen was not ready to walk.