I didn’t want to ruin your marriage.”

And something deep inside me, hearing that, hardened all the way into stone — not hot, but cold, and permanent, like a thing that has finished forming and will never change shape again.

But my voice, when I spoke, stayed perfectly level, because my mother had had enough of raised voices in that house to last several lifetimes.

I didn’t want to ruin your marriage. I have turned that sentence of my mother’s over more than any other, because it contains, in seven words, the whole tragedy of how good people get trapped by bad ones.

My mother was being starved, and grabbed, and robbed, and locked out of the food in her own son’s kitchen — and the thing that kept her silent, month after month, was not fear of Wendy, or not only that.

It was love of me.