And so my mother had done to my life what she would have done to a hostile takeover of one of our properties: identified the threat, priced it, made an offer, and when the offer was refused, escalated to force.

She had run my heart like a portfolio.

The terrible thing, the thing I could not stop turning over as I stood on that marble floor, was that she had never once experienced any of it as cruelty.

In her own mind she was not a villain.

She was a diligent steward, doing the hard, unglamorous work of protecting the family from itself, and the fact that the family she was protecting it from was her own grandsons had simply never registered as a contradiction.

That is what a stranger she was.