You haven’t looked at her once since you walked in.

You didn’t bring a blanket.

You didn’t ask if I was alive.

You came here to collect a tax.” Her face went pale, and then a mottled, furious purple, and she looked around my small living room as if searching for a jury, someone to turn to and share her outrage with.

But there was no one there.

There was only me, and my crying daughter, and the enormous, ringing silence of a boundary that was, for the first time in the history of our family, simply going to hold.

The word I chose in that moment — tax — was not an accident, and I have been glad of it ever since, because it named the thing with a precision my mother could not argue against.