She blamed me to anyone who would listen.

And I came to understand that this was not stubbornness, exactly, but something closer to the load-bearing wall of her entire personality.

To apologize to me would have required her to accept that I had been a person all along — that the daughter-in-law she’d spent five years treating as furniture had a dignity that could be wronged.

Her whole life was built on the premise that people like me existed to be used and that people like her existed to do the using, and admitting she owed me an apology would have collapsed that premise entirely, and taken her sense of herself down with it.

She would genuinely rather lose her house than lose that.

She did lose her house.