My mother’s fist came down on the glass.

“That miserable old man tricked me all along!” she screamed.

And even Chloe flinched at that — because my mother, learning that her husband of years was dead and had left a fortune, did not call him her husband, and did not call him by his name.

She called him a trick that had been played on her.

She had never, I understood then, seen him as anything but a sum of money that had failed to pay out.

That single word — tricked — told me more about my mother than thirty-six years of living in her house had.