Warren’s letter ran three pages. He wrote that he had watched me spend forty-nine years making room, at every table, in every plan, for everyone, and that he had come to fear the day it would be mistaken for the belief that nothing was mine. He wrote that the lake house was mine, that the deciding was mine, and that he had left the trust deliberately unfinished so that the last word on who received it would be spoken by me alone, in a room, on a day I chose. Then, in the final paragraph, he suggested the one thing I had never once considered. That I stop lending the lake house to people who called it theirs, and start living in it.

So the change-of-address card I mailed Grant listed the lake house on Halstead Lake. I moved there in the autumn. I sold the house in town, the one with the garden, which was the hardest part, but I planted marigolds along the screened porch and they came up the following spring exactly as they always had.