Mr. Thompson was older than George by at least twenty years, with a face permanently arranged into sympathetic lines and the kind of dignified patience that made every conversation feel like it had been moved half a step closer to church. He handled the basics first. Our apartment came to me. The savings accounts came to me. George’s small life-insurance policy came to me. I sat in the leather chair across from him and nodded through all of it, exhausted enough to feel as though my bones had been replaced with cold wax.

Then Mr. Thompson opened his desk drawer, took out a simple ring of keys, and slid them across the polished wood.

“The farmhouse is yours now, Mrs. Pierce.”

I stared at the keys and felt an immediate instinctive resistance rise up in me.

“I’ll sell it,” I said. “As soon as possible. I don’t know anything about managing property. I’ve never even been there.”

Mr. Thompson’s expression changed.

Just slightly. But enough.

He leaned back in his chair, took off his glasses, and polished them with a handkerchief before answering me. When he finally looked up again, there was something almost like pity in his eyes.

“Your husband was a complicated man,” he said quietly.

I remember actually laughing once, a small humorless sound.

“No,” I said. “George was the least complicated man I ever met.”

Mr. Thompson put his glasses back on and folded his hands together.

“With respect, Mrs. Pierce, there are some things about your husband that are not mine to explain. He made me promise. But he also made me promise that if anything happened to him, you would receive the keys and the choice would be yours. All I ask is that you see the property before you decide to sell it.”

“What’s there?” I asked.

He hesitated.

Then he said, “Something worth understanding.”

For a week I carried those keys in my purse without touching them.

I handled paperwork. I signed insurance forms. I boxed up George’s shirts for donation and cried into one of his old flannel sleeves because it still smelled faintly like cedar and laundry soap. I went back to work because books had to be closed and payroll had to be run, and routine was the only thing keeping me from floating off the edge of my own life. Every evening I came home to an apartment that felt too quiet without George’s careful footsteps and the scrape of his chair against the kitchen floor.

At night I lay awake thinking about the farm.