The trouble came when Mrs. Okafor's daughter asked Marta, directly: "Do you know what's wrong with my mother?"
They were standing in Marta's kitchen. Adaeze had come to the door without calling first, which was itself a kind of answer to a question no one had asked. She was holding her car keys like she might need them again quickly.
Marta knew several things. She knew that Mrs. Okafor had stopped watering the garden in June, though the tomato cages were still standing. She knew that the recycling bin had been going out with newspapers still in the plastic sleeve — unread, but not canceled. She knew about the Thursday when Mrs. Okafor had told her the same story about her cousin's wedding three times in forty minutes, and the way she'd paused after the third telling, not because she remembered telling it but because something in Marta's face had become difficult to look at.
She knew these things the way you know which step on your neighbor's porch creaks. Not because you were listening for it.
"She seems a little tired lately," Marta said.
Adaeze set her keys on the counter. That was worse than the question. The keys meant she wasn't leaving yet. The keys meant she'd come here to do something she hadn't done yet.
"My mother calls you by name," Adaeze said. "She talks about what you cook. She doesn't call me by name anymore. She calls me 'the girl who visits.'"
Marta turned to the sink because there was a pan in it and putting your hands in water is something you can do while your face is deciding what shape to hold.
"How long?" Adaeze said.
This was the second question, and it was the real one. Not what's wrong but how long have you known and not said anything. The answer was since March. The answer was that Marta had driven Mrs. Okafor to the pharmacy twice because she'd forgotten she'd already gone, and both times Marta had told herself it wasn't her place to call anyone. Both times she'd said anyone in her head when what she meant was Adaeze.
Because calling the daughter would have meant something. It would have meant: I am close enough to your mother to diagnose her. It would have meant: we are not just the women who hand tomatoes across the fence and comment on the weather. Marta had not wanted to be the person who knew more about Mrs. Okafor's interior life than her own daughter did. That felt like a trespass.
"I don't know exactly when I started noticing," Marta said, which was true the way most careful sentences are true — in the parts you can see.
Adaeze looked at the pan in the sink. It had been soaking long enough that the water was cold.
"You could have called me," she said. Not angry. Something flatter than angry. The voice of someone who drove four hours to confirm what she already suspected and is now finding out that confirmation had been available locally the whole time.
"I wasn't sure it was my place."
"You drive her to the pharmacy."
"She asked me to."
"She asked you," Adaeze repeated. She picked up her keys. She put them back down. "She asks you. She doesn't ask me. She tells me everything is fine and then she asks you."
This was the thing Marta hadn't wanted to stand inside. Not the decline. The architecture of it — who Mrs. Okafor had chosen to lean on, and what that said about the distance between mother and daughter that had nothing to do with the four-hour drive.
"I'm sorry," Marta said.
"What are you sorry for?"
Marta turned off the water. She dried her hands on a towel that was already damp.
"I don't know," she said. "I think I'm sorry that I know what I know."
Adaeze stood there for a while. Then she nodded, once, like she understood exactly what that meant. She took her keys. She didn't say goodbye. She went next door to sit with her mother, who would call her "the girl" and describe a cousin's wedding she'd already described a hundred times, and Adaeze would listen, and Marta would stay in her kitchen with the cold pan and the damp towel and the specific weight of having been asked something she couldn't answer without betraying someone's idea of what her life was.
Not Mrs. Okafor's. Her own.