Megan’s mother had begun asking questions over the course of the following year. Specific questions about the number of bedrooms, the distance to the boardwalk, whether the town got crowded in August, what the property taxes ran. Eleanor had answered them politely because she was polite, and she had found afterward that politeness in this particular context felt uncomfortably close to complicity. Megan’s sister had been similarly curious. The questions had a shape to them, a purposeful architecture that Eleanor could not quite call evidence but also could not ignore. She had done what so many women of her generation do when they are trying not to become the difficult one: she had ignored the tone, changed the subject, and hoped that manners would do the work that direct conversation should have done.
She had been curing herself of that habit for several months before the Friday afternoon that completed the cure entirely.
She turned into the driveway a day earlier than expected, intending only to open the house for the weekend and perhaps take a long walk on the beach before anyone arrived. What she found instead stopped her with her hands still on the wheel.