Three mornings later, after the dog walk but before my cereal and cup of tea, in the middle of my writing morning, in what I believe is the middle of a paragraph, I finish a sentence. I lift my pencil a few inches from the page and read it. It’s the last sentence of the book. I can’t think of another. That’s it. I have my underpainting.

It’s strange, to not be the youngest kind of adult anymore.

Alone was not something you saw among tribes she’d studied. From an early age children were warned against it. Alone was how your soul got stolen by spirits, or your body kidnapped by enemies. Alone was when your thinking turned to evil. The culture often had proverbs against it. Not even a possum walks alone was the Tam’s most repeated one.

That night at Gertie’s when she asked me if I preferred to be the one who loved slightly more or loved slightly less. More, I said. Not this time, she said in my ear. I am the one who will always love more. I didn’t say, But I love without needing to own. Because I didn’t know the difference then.

My mother was a real person. I am not a real person.

The geese are all asleep. A few tip their heads out from under their wings as we approach. I open the cookie tin and a few more sway slowly over to us. It’s cold, and Silas has wrapped the green blanket around me so I feel like I have wings, too.

When I was visiting her a few years ago she hugged me and said, ‘Tomorrow after you leave I will stand here at this window and remember that yesterday you were right here with me.

I wanted her and no one else to tell me the story of how she died.

Certain people bring out certain traits in each other. Don’t you think? If I had a husband, for example, who said, ‘Your typing makes my brain work batter,’ I would not be so ashamed of my impulse to work.

Usually a man in my life slows my work down, but it turns out two men give me fresh energy for the revision.