The thing about my mother is that she has a flat voice too.

I want that on the record before any of this starts, because for six weeks I have been telling myself I got the dryness from nowhere, that it’s a thing I built, load bearing, mine. It isn’t. It’s inherited. Ellen Delaney has been delivering devastating information in a completely level tone since 1974, and both her daughters came out of her with one of the two available settings — Margot got the weather, and I got the barometer.

So when Margot says, at 6:40 in the morning, over the phone, “I’ll just call Mom and ask for it back,” what I say is:

“Absolutely not.”

“Cora—”

“Margot, listen to me. If you call Mom at seven in the morning and ask for a candle back, what does she hear?”

“She hears her daughter asking for—”

“She hears a lie.” I’m pacing the kitchen in a t-shirt, and Ash is watching me from the counter with a cup of coffee and the expression of a man at a very good play. “She hears her forty-one-year-old daughter making a special trip for a nine-dollar candle. And then she’ll say of course, sweetheart, and she’ll hand it over, and then she will spend the next four days working out what it is we don’t want her to have.”

“You’re being paranoid.”

“I’m being her.”

“Okay, well, I’m going anyway,” says Margot, “because I made the thing, and I’m not going to sit here while Mom has a doorbell on her mantel.”

She hangs up.

“That went well,” Ash says.

“That’s going to be a catastrophe.”

“Mm.” He turns his cup around. “For what it’s worth, I agree with you.”

“Which part?”

“The part where the two of you drive out there and lie to a woman who raised you both,” he says. “It’s a good plan for a candle. It’s a very poor plan for a mother.”

✦ ✦ ✦

Here’s what I know about the schedule, and I want it laid out plainly, because it’s now a thing I live inside.

He gets called about twice a week.

Since the new arrangement he wakes me every time — a hand on my shoulder, my name once, that emptied-out look coming on him like a tide going out. Sometimes it’s twenty minutes. Once it was four hours and he came back gray and wouldn’t talk about it until the next afternoon and then did.

So I’ve started sleeping lighter and I’ve stopped pretending I’m not. And on Monday morning, standing in my kitchen with a phone in my hand, what I’m thinking about isn’t the candle in my mother’s house.

It’s the fact that my mother’s house is forty minutes away, and if she lights it, I can’t get there first.

✦ ✦ ✦

Margot’s report, delivered by voice memo at 2:14 that afternoon, in the tone of a woman who has been in a car for a while:

“Okay. It’s fine. It’s fine. I said I wanted it back because I’d used the wrong wax lot and there was a recall — which is true, Cora, there’s a recall on the 2023 lot, I have documentation—”

“That’s four batches ago,” I say to my phone, uselessly, because it’s a voice memo.

“—and she said, and I quote, ‘Which candle.’ And I said the one in the organza bag, and she said, ‘Margot, you have given me nine candles.’”

I put my forehead against the refrigerator.

“So I had to go through and look at all nine,” Margot says. “In front of her. And she watched me do it. She watched me, Cora, she stood in the doorway with a dish towel and she did not say one single word for four minutes, and then when I found it she said, ‘That one,’ and I said yes, and she said —”

A long pause. Traffic sounds.

“She said, ‘Is your sister all right?’”

✦ ✦ ✦

At 6:50 that evening, we’re on the couch. There’s a bowl of something on the coffee table. The television is on. This is a completely ordinary Monday and I want it noted that we had earned it.

Ash stops mid-sentence.

I’m already moving before his face finishes changing. I’m on my feet with my keys in my hand, and he catches my wrist — gently, the last human thing he does before the rest goes — and says: