I called him back a few weeks later to tighten a wobble that had developed at the crossbars. We went out for lunch. He called me when he was next in town, to check on the repair. I asked him for a quote for a built-in bookcase in the family room. When he came to fit the bookcase, he took me out to dinner. Six years my senior, Robin was industrious and softhearted, with an indulgent smile that I thought was reserved for me until I saw him bestow the same smile on checkout girls, waiters, and car mechanics as he coaxed them into conversation.

Robin slowly tunneled into my life until it seemed he’d always been there, holding forth on wood grain, sonatas, and wildlife. It was not in Robin’s nature to force things, and I had to be on my guard until I could judge the consequences for Maddy. But she was growing up and needing me less, and after the first weeks, during which she refused to smile at him, she grew more and more open to Robin’s presence in our lives, even urging me, as she put it, to “seal the deal.”

“Seal the deal? What do you know about sealing the deal?”

“More than you think.”

One Saturday when Maddy was at a slumber party, Robin came over to eat fish tacos and enjoy our newly repaired fireplace. At that time, the empty house held an erotic allure and we moved from the living room floor to the bedroom, and soon we were spending most of our weekends together. We each had one child—his was a twenty-three-year-old son in Cincinnati whom he didn’t often see, the product of an early disastrous marriage—which meant that there was no pressure on us to procreate. Robin found a nearby garage to rent for a workshop, and with little ceremony, he moved in. I remember thinking at the time that life was as good as it had ever been. Maddy was diagnosed seven months later.

I couldn’t stop my fingers tracing spirals on the wood, circling in one direction, then the other. Nothing about this table was symmetrical, apart from its uniform thickness. It was made of two lengths of golden red walnut, straight-cut across one end, tapered to curves on the other, and fastened together with inlaid butterfly joints. A long crack at the straight end was part of the design and its charm. The table was one of the few possessions I would go into a burning house to save. Maddy, though, had never liked it. She found it lopsided and unfinished.

Robin came over and stilled my hands with his own. He wrapped his arms around me. “Turn down the AC. I’ll unload the car and call Mrs. P. We’ll go straight to sleep.”