Audrey’s pulse quickened as she thought about all those family meals eaten in silence: Audrey, Lily, and Jess at a kitchen table too big for just the three of them, Audrey keeping her voice bright as she asked the girls about school, trying hard not to react to Jess’s monosyllabic responses. She could picture her hand, knocking on Jess’s bedroom door, asking if she wanted to come and watch TV, and hearing the same flat reply, night after night: No, I just want to be on my own. Audrey had asked herself repeatedly over the years what she might have missed and whether she could have done anything differently to change the course of her daughters’ relationship. So many times since Jess had left home and cut Lily out of her life completely, Audrey had begged Jess to tell her the reason, but Jess had refused to confide in her. Now Audrey had two daughters who never spoke and two seventeen-year-old granddaughters, born just six weeks apart, who were not permitted to meet.

Her nails dug into her palms as she remembered the last time she had tried—and failed—to reconcile her family.

“Granny, is everything OK? Do you want me to come and help?”

“Thanks, darling, but I’m fine. I’m just pottering.”

Fine. Audrey didn’t know why she used a word they all knew to be so far from the truth.

Looking into the dressing table mirror there was no sign, nothing to give her away. Only the most modest lines around her eyes. Her hair, salon-dried yesterday, was artificially brown but still kicked up playfully from where it rested on her shoulders. Her makeup was faultless, applied that morning before she’d even got dressed.

People often told her they couldn’t believe she was sixty-two. You look at least a decade younger, they’d exclaim and foolishly she’d allowed herself to believe there was some significance in it, that an outward appearance of well-being automatically filtered through to the inside. As though a perfectly appetizing apple couldn’t be rotten when you bit into it.

It was only if you looked a little closer, as Audrey did now, that you might have detected the palest purple hue forming half-moons under her eyes, or the frequency with which the muscles across her forehead pulled into a frown. It was only watching her closely that you might have observed the shortness of breath, the small half-gasps as if some air had got left behind and was trying to catch up. But there was nothing really on her face to inform a casual observer that, inside her, cells were dividing and multiplying with unremitting speed. There was nothing to betray the truth that she was, in fact, dying.

Audrey turned away from the mirror and bent down toward the box at her feet. As she reached inside, a sharp pain sliced through the right half of her abdomen, causing her to ease herself back onto the bed. As she breathed slowly against the pain, Audrey understood why Jess had been so keen for her to move in sooner rather than later. Audrey had wanted to wait, to hold on to her house and her independence for as long as she could. She had hoped to live at home until her body made it clear that it could no longer cope. Now she felt grateful for Jess’s counsel, grateful that she had sold the house and her furniture, keeping only the essentials—both practical and sentimental—before her health deteriorated even further. Sitting on the bed, willing the pain away, she realized that had she waited she might not have been able to organize the move herself, might have imposed an even greater burden on her daughters.