W ITH CELIA’S PASSING AND HARRY gone and myself finally in a marriage that, while chaste, was stable, my life officially became entirely void of scandal. Me. Evelyn Hugo. A boring old lady. Robert and I lived a friendly marriage for the next eleven years. We moved back to Manhattan in the mid-2000s to be closer to Connor. We refinished this apartment. We donated some of Celia’s money to LGBTQ+ organizations and lung disease research. Every Christmas, we threw a benefit for homeless youth organizations in New York City. After years on a quiet beach, it was nice to be members of society again in some ways. But all I really cared about was Connor. She had worked her way up the ladder at Merrill Lynch, and then, shortly after Robert and I moved back to New York, she admitted to him that she hated the culture of finance. She told him she had to leave. He was disappointed that she hadn’t been happy with what had made him happy; that was obvious. But he was never disappointed in her. And he was the first person to congratulate her when she took a job teaching at Wharton. She never knew that he had made a few calls on her behalf. He never wanted her to know. He merely wanted to help her, in any and all ways that he could. And he did that, lovingly, until he died at age eighty-one. Connor gave the eulogy. Her boyfriend, Greg, was one of the pallbearers. Afterward, she and Greg came to stay with me for a while. “Mom, after seven husbands, I’m not sure you’ve had any practice living on your own,” she said as she sat at my dining room table, the same table she used to sit at in a high chair with Harry, Celia, John, and me. “I lived a very full life before you were born,” I told her. “I lived alone once, and I can do it again. You and Greg should go live your lives. Really.” But the moment I shut the door behind them, I realized just how huge this apartment was, just how quiet. That’s when I hired Grace.