I have kept a copy of that letter, with her permission, because I think it is the wisest thing anyone in my family has ever written, and because it corrected an error I had spent my whole life making.

I had always believed that love and consequences were opposites — that to truly love your child was to keep rescuing him, keep forgiving, keep the door not just open but unguarded, no matter what he did.

Hazel had believed it too, longer and more painfully than I had; her whole life had been an argument that a mother’s love should have no floor.

And Garnet had learned, from both of us, the most dangerous lesson a child can learn: that our love was unconditional in the specific, ruinous sense that it came with no conditions at all, that there was nothing he could do to lose it or even to strain it, that he could treat us however he liked and the safety net would always, always hold.