"Did she say why?" Celeste said. "Why she stopped."

A pause. Long enough that she turned from the window to look at him.

He was looking at the garden over her shoulder. Something in his expression that was carefully neutral and underneath the careful neutrality was not.

"No," he said. "She didn't."

She looked at him for a moment. At the eight years in his face, the specific weight of someone who had known a person well and was navigating what to say to the person who had inherited them.

"Roman," she said.

He looked at her.

"What was she like?" she said. "At the end."

He held her gaze....