It is a far worse thing to watch her intuition brush up against that fact — to see her frown at a wrongness she cannot name, to hear her ask a careful question because some true instinct in her has caught a scent — and to answer that instinct by making her feel foolish for having it.

My mother had known, in the way that people know things before they can prove them, that something in her house was wrong.

She had felt it, and she had reached toward it, and every time she did, the men around her, including her own son, had gently, lovingly, turned her hand away and told her she was imagining things.

We had not just deceived her.

We had taught her to distrust the one faculty that was trying to protect her, her own perception, until she no longer believed what her own life was plainly telling her.

There is a special cruelty in that, in making a person the enemy of her own clear sight, and we did it to her for months and called it keeping the peace.