So she talked to men when she talked at all. She’d say the word abuse and their eyes would drift to the scars on her face and neck. Discomfort would close their mouths. And they wouldn’t open them again until the topic had changed. So she would obligingly let them off the hook and talk about something else to get what she needed in order to return to her sketch pads, internet, and wine.

When she’d needed a job, the Craigslist search led her to Eddie Delahunt, who, like every other man, squirmed under the weight of her tale and lowered his eyes from the implied nightmare of the right side of her face. But she was pleasant and still exuded her old competence, and he hired her on the spot to care for his eighty-six-year-old mother, June.

The pay was a small weekly stipend and a garage apartment with a bed, a desk, four cane-backed chairs around a glass dinette set from the eighties, and an internet connection. Bare bones. Anonymous, but friendly. The stuff that fresh starts and soul starvations were made of.

Caring for June had slowed Emma’s days to the speed of a body that had seen nearly ninety years. There was so much to notice at that pace. The bottom line—that there was only this one life and what you chose to drag through it—worked at Emma’s conscience. Haunting her family electronically reminded her of what she used to be not all that long ago.

Her sister’s latest Facebook conversation beckoned. With June full of her bird’s portion of dinner and her last vice, a nightly gin and tonic that was practically homeopathic for its mere whiff of Bombay Sapphire, Emma tucked her into bed and raised the safety rail. The evening’s pills went down with a little Ovaltine, and June’s dentures went into the soak. Emma brushed the old woman’s hair and felt herself relax in tandem with her. She kissed June’s cool forehead, furrowed as it tended to get in the later hours, as the confusion rose with the moon. Emma put on Rosemary Clooney’s greatest hits and set it to auto-repeat.

She’d come back later to check on June before she went to bed herself. Eddie had already called in for his nightly debrief of his mother’s day. His conscience jousted with his work schedule, and it soothed him to know how she was doing without having to do it all himself.