It was a silent disqualification.

You don’t bother to measure the inventory you’ve already decided will never go to market.

I survived by learning to read my mother’s emotional weather the way a sailor reads a darkening horizon.

The microscopic tightening of her jaw.

The rigid angle at which she set her crystal water goblet.

The stark difference between her high, musical public laugh and her real one—a dry, hacking sound I’d heard maybe five times in my life.