I went into labour at my husband’s funeral and my mother-in-law told me to call a taxi. Twelve days later the two of them were at my door asking for their grandchild.

She said that in a funeral parlour, opening my fingers to get a wedding ring out of them, over her own son’s coffin, in front of sixty people.

She was right about the two years.

She was two years and one week off knowing that her elder son had spent eight of them quietly sending four hundred and forty dollars a month to a woman she had paid to disappear — and had written all of it down in January, and signed it.

The ring is not the point of this story and I did not get it back.

It came off her hand somewhere in that aisle while Arthur was moving me, and it went under the carpet runner, and the funeral director found it four days later and posted it to me in the same small envelope.