They love me in their way.

They’d come through if it really mattered. It is astonishing what a child will do to keep believing she is loved by the people who made her; she will rewrite decades of evidence, she will forgive the unforgivable in advance, she will carry the whole weight of the relationship on her own back and call it family.

And then my husband and my two children died, and I asked my parents to stand beside me while I buried them, and they said no, because of a dinner — and three days later my mother’s one communication was to inform me that Serena felt hurt. And the thing I had been holding up for thirty years, the belief that underneath it all they loved me, could not survive that sentence.

There was no rewriting it.