The people who are sure they know exactly how small you are cannot see you clearly enough to protect themselves from you, because seeing you clearly would require them to abandon the very assumption their whole comfort rests on.

Vance had spent our entire marriage certain he had married a pushover.

He signed that page still certain of it.

He was still certain of it, I think, right up until the moment in the ballroom when I held it up — and by then the certainty had cost him everything, which is what certainty about other people usually costs, in the end, if you hold it long enough and hard enough and refuse to look.

Chapter 13 — The Welcome Party

Two days later, my mother announced a grand welcome party for the baby, at an exclusive country club, the kind of event she had spent her whole life staging to project a prosperity our family increasingly did not have.