While she waited for her staff to arrive, she took a red marker and wrote E beside each of the tasks that were her responsibility. The workload, even spread over three weeks, was daunting. She’d never get it done if she had to be on watch for her mother.

“Hey, are you all right?” Nick’s voice startled her. She looked over as he entered the conference room. He held a cup of coffee out to her. “You look like you could use this.”

“Thanks,” Evie said, taking it. She did need coffee. She inhaled and took a sip. It had a hazelnut edge.

The other two members of her team filed into the conference room and took their places at the table—Maia, whom she’d hired last year, fresh out of graduate school, and Marie-Christine, who was a Barnard College intern. Now they were all looking at her.

“I’m sorry if I’ve seemed distracted. My mother is seriously ill,” Evie told them, starting the little speech she’d practiced on the ride in and trying to sound as businesslike and unemotional as possible. “I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but I might need to cut back on my hours. My sister and I are trying to take it one day at a time. With the opening so soon, I’d like us to put together a backup plan just in case.”

They had started to go through, figuring out which of them could take over which of her tasks, when Evie’s phone went off. The number on the readout was her mother’s neighborhood. The hospital? Evie’s stomach did a flip-flop. She excused herself and stepped out into the hall to take the call.

“Mrs. Ferrante?” The man’s voice was unfamiliar.

Evie swallowed. “This is her daughter.”

“Oh, right. This is Jack, from Egan’s Sunoco. We’ve got your mother’s Subaru up on the lift?” Evie sagged against the wall, relief sweeping through her. Of course. That’s who Finn must have called to tow the car, the gas station where her mother had always gone to have their car tuned. “We thought it would be an easy repair, but it turns out it’s not. The fuel tank needs to be replaced. The fuel pump and filler pipe, too.”

Fuel tank. Fuel pump. Filler pipe. Evie heard the words, but she wasn’t really processing them.

“The rest of the car looks fine. And with a little luck we can probably have it fixed for you in a day or two. But I didn’t want to start the work until I checked with you first. Run you about eight hundred.”

So much for an inexpensive repair. For a moment Evie felt paralyzed. Did it make sense to repair a car her mother would never drive again? Still, it had to be fixed or she and Ginger would never be able to sell it.

“Go ahead,” she told him as she imagined a flock of her mother’s hundred-dollar bills sprouting wings and flying out the window.

When she returned to the conference room, she was confronted with the worried faces of her staff. No, she told them, the call wasn’t the hospital.

When her phone rang an hour later, it was. Her mother had lost consciousness while she was undergoing a brain scan. She was in intensive care.

Chapter Thirty-five

The parking lot at Pelham Manor was nearly full. Even the handicap spot where Mina always used to park whenever she visited Annabelle was taken. Mina had to zigzag back a few rows to find a spot. Brian came around and made a show of offering her his arm, but she ignored him. She started toward the building, trying to ignore the persistent drizzle and Brian’s inane remarks about the weather.

In the circular drive by the entrance, a van was parked, its side door open and a hydraulic lift raising an old man in a wheelchair. Annabelle had taken a few van trips to the mall when she’d first moved to Pelham Manor, but on one outing she’d wandered into the basement and gotten lost. It had taken security hours to find her, and after that the staff at Pelham Manor had put a stop to her trips.

Mina got to the front entrance first and rang the bell. As she waited, Brian caught up to her. There was a buzz and a click, and he pulled the door open for her to go inside. Then he went to the front desk and talked to the receptionist.

Mina looked around the familiar space. Plastic forsythia bloomed in a vase on the table by the elevator. Last time she’d been here, there’d been sprays of autumn leaves and bittersweet. Fortunately the bittersweet had been fake, too—she remembered reading somewhere that the real thing was poisonous, and more than a few of the patients on Annabelle’s floor were as likely to eat floral arrangements as look at them.

Mina heard a discreet throat-clearing and turned to find a woman in a light blue suit with a staff badge hanging around her neck standing beside her. Smiling, tall, and elegantly silver-haired, she reminded Mina of Mrs. Weber, her fourth-grade teacher, who told her students she’d once been a fashion model.

“Good morning, Mrs. Yetner,” the woman said. She gave Mina’s hand the gentle squeeze of someone who knew better than to put pressure on arthritic fingers. Brian came over to join them. “And Mr. Granville. It’s good to see you both again. Celeste Hall.”

Mina squinted at the badge the woman wore. It was easier for her to remember names if she saw them in print. But the print side of the badge was twisted around, facing the woman’s chest.

The woman turned back to Mina. “It was good to get your call.”

“My what?”

“Here.” She gave Mina a large envelope. A sticker on the front said THE MATERIAL YOU REQUESTED, which she most certainly had not. But it was the name written on the front, Wilhelmina, that gave her a start. The last person who’d called her that was Annabelle, and only when she was annoyed.

“I’m happy to show you around our independent living tier,” the woman went on, leading the way to the elevator. As Mina trailed behind in her wake, she smelled tangerine and ginger. Now Mina remembered. This was the woman who’d been there when Mina had checked Annabelle in on that hot summer day, efficient, calm, and frequently glancing at the large man’s watch she wore on her wrist then as she did now.

The woman pressed the elevator call button and turned back. With a sympathetic smile on her face, she said, “Independent living is quite different from assisted living, and of course Memory Care where your sister stayed with us is something else entirely. We have three hundred and fifty . . .”

Mercifully, the elevator doors had opened. The annoyingly cheerful woman, whose name Mina had already forgotten, rattled on with her canned speech as they rode the elevator up one floor, so slowly that it felt as if they were barely moving at all.

Instead of a locked door with a nurses’ station beyond, as there’d been on Annabelle’s floor, the elevator doors opened onto a spacious, brightly lit room littered with sofas and wing chairs that looked as if they’d lost their way en route to a furniture showroom.

When Mina and Annabelle had first visited, Annabelle had said, “But everyone is so old.” Mina had laughed, but now she was thinking the exact same thing as a woman shuffled past, pushing a walker tethered to an oxygen tank. An old man sat nodding off in a chair.

But it wasn’t all shuffle and nap. A woman who sat reading a USA Today lowered her paper and gave Mina a sharp appraising look as the energetic guide led them down a hall to a library where all five computer stations were in use. Maybe Mina would finally get around to learning how to use one. Past that was a room set up like a den with a big TV and card tables. Four women there were playing mah-jongg. Another foursome, men and women, were playing poker, betting with nickels.

“Are you a card player?” their cheerful guide asked with a treacly smile. Lipstick was smeared on her front tooth.

Mina said she wasn’t, but she wondered if anyone still knew how to play whist. She’d passed many a pleasant evening playing that with her grandmother.