“You are banishing your own mother,” Margaret said.

“No,” Adam replied.

“I’m ending the arrangement where you make decisions for me and my child without accountability.”

She asked whether Clara had put him up to it.

He told her Clara had not discussed Margaret’s living arrangements at all.

Margaret did not believe him.

She had spent so long assuming every relationship was a competition for power that she could not imagine a decision made out of love without a hidden bargain.

That night she wandered through the sitting room, touching the photographs along the mantel.