And at about two o'clock Verity came out and said: "He wants to know if you'd come in."
So I met my mother-in-law for the first and only time for about forty minutes, on the last afternoon of her life, six days after I married her son.
She was very small. She had her hands folded like somebody waiting for a bus.
I did not say anything meaningful. I said hello and I said my name and I said that I had heard she used to grow dahlias, which Verity had told me in the car park.
And Grady sat on the other side of the bed and did not look at me once in forty minutes.
The smile.
People always ask me about that first.
Under the porch light. On the phone. That smile.
I built four days of certainty on it. I sat in my mother's kitchen and described it to her and she went pale, because a smile like that on a man walking to another woman's car at two in the morning means one thing.
