“Like what?”

Vanessa sighed with practiced patience. “Margaret, we’ve tried to be patient.”

I looked at her. For the first six months after she married Daniel, she’d called me Mom. Then I became Margaret. Eventually, when speaking about me while I stood in the room, I became she.

“She needs reminders,” Vanessa continued. “She leaves things in the kitchen. She interrupts the children’s routines. She keeps insisting on doing work no one asked her to do.”

I glanced toward the soup, the folded laundry beside the pantry, and the school permission slip I’d signed that morning because neither parent remembered it was due.

“What work?”

Vanessa’s expression tightened. “This is exactly what I mean. You turn every conversation into an argument.”

“I asked a question.”

Daniel rubbed his forehead. “Mom, please don’t make this harder.”

For three years, that sentence had ended nearly every disagreement. Please don’t make this harder when Vanessa moved my wedding photographs out of the living room.

Please don’t make this harder when they gave my bedroom to a visiting business associate and moved me into the converted storage room. Please don’t make this harder when I was expected to cook dinner for twelve guests without warning.

Please don’t make this harder when I asked why the money from selling my apartment had never appeared in the investment reports Daniel had promised.