I had spent seven years making unilateral decisions to please my mother.

The most loving thing I could do now was to stop making unilateral decisions at all, even generous ones, even ones meant to atone — to hand back not just the security but the authority I had taken, and to build, from there, a marriage in which neither of us ever again needed the other’s permission to be a full person in our own home.

Chapter 37 — The Balcony

Six months later my mother asked to visit Dev for his birthday, and came to the door with a small cake.

Amina met her there.

“In this house,” Amina told her, “no one speaks ill of anyone.