I had a good memory and a copier.

I used what I had.”

I have turned that sentence over more than almost anything else my mother ever said to me, because it contains a whole philosophy of survival that I had spent my life too young and too sheltered to understand. I used what I had. My father’s power was loud and obvious — the money, the lawyers, the Senator on the phone, the whole visible apparatus of a man who could make things happen.

And because it was loud and obvious, it was also, in the end, brittle, because everyone could see exactly where it lived and exactly how to freeze it.

My mother’s power was the opposite.

It was quiet, and unremarkable, and beneath everyone’s notice, especially my father’s — a woman with a good memory and access to a copy machine, doing a thing so undramatic that no one, in a decade, ever once thought to stop her.