My phone buzzed — an acquaintance back in Arizona, passing along some update about how far Craig had fallen — and I looked at it for a moment and then put the phone in my pocket without answering, because I found I did not need it, and went back to watching my mother laugh at something my father said.

The water was very still that evening, holding the last of the light.

I thought, standing there, about the woman who had sat at a kitchen table in Mesa transferring fifteen hundred dollars every month and calling it keeping the peace, and I felt toward her the way you feel toward a younger self who did not yet know something you would give a great deal to have told her.

I was not angry at her anymore.

She had been doing the only thing she knew how to do, which was to try to buy safety by making herself useful and small.

It had taken a slap and a beating and a courtroom to teach her that safety cannot be purchased and that the price of trying is always, in the end, everything you have.