Margaret was humming somewhere down the hallway, the same soft, slightly off key tune she used to hum when we were girls sharing a bedroom, back before either of us had husbands or houses or any of this particular kind of trouble to sort through.
I carried my single cup of coffee to the same wooden table where our family had eaten cereal together for eighteen years running, and I sat down, without quite planning to, in the chair I actually wanted to sit in that morning, rather than the one I had always automatically taken out of long habit.
The morning line was that Rachel had knocked on my door to end my marriage. What I understood now, sitting there with the steam rising off my coffee and the whole quiet house settled comfortably around me, was that she had actually done something closer to the opposite. She hadn’t taken my life apart that morning. She had simply been the one, entirely without meaning to, who finally handed it back to me.
