She spent eleven years of her marriage managing a woman in Bay Ridge, and she did it alone, and nobody ever thanked her for it because nobody ever knew.

She watched my father become a man who would not discuss it, and she has described the last twenty years of that marriage in a single sentence that I have not been able to shake, which is: we were extremely polite.

And then in 2018 her son, at thirty-eight, fell in love with a woman who ran charity galas, and my mother looked at her and did not see an opportunist, whatever she said at dinners.

She saw the beginning of a sequence.