"I could make this work," Margaret said. "I could also keep making the guest room work. I want a week to sit with it."
They gave her the week. During that week Daniel found himself walking through the house at night after everyone else was asleep, touching the banister, looking at the family photographs on the staircase wall, standing in the foyer where it had all begun. He remembered Margaret's winter coat. He remembered Allison's folded arms. He remembered the sentence that had rearranged his marriage: Ask your wife.
On the seventh day Margaret called them into the living room. She sat on the beige sofa. The floor lamp was on. The children's shoes were by the door. The house smelled faintly of the lemon polish she had used on the coffee table that morning.
"I am staying," she said. "Not because Cedar Ridge is beneath me. Not because I want to punish anyone by remaining. I am staying because this is where I am useful and where I am loved in the complicated way families love, and because a parking-lot window is not worth the cost of leaving a kitchen where my grandchildren ask me for pancakes. If that becomes untrue — if this house cannot hold me without breaking — I will say so. I will not wait for a letter. I will not wait for a signature. I will tell you at this table, with my own mouth."
Allison cried then. Not the careful non-tears of October. Real ones. She crossed the living room and sat beside Margaret and took her hand, and Margaret let her.