The difference is that we chose to protect each other.

You chose to sacrifice us so he wouldn’t leave.”

There was no answer to that, and my mother gave none, because there was none to give.

It is the sentence I think of whenever I am tempted, even now, to soften what she was — whenever some part of me, the part a child never fully loses, wants to believe she was only weak, only frightened, only swept along.

Because we had been frightened too.