The woman who had stood inside a warm, dry, beautiful house and listened to her small grandson pounding on a locked door and pleading to be let in from a freezing storm, and had chosen, with all of that warmth at her back, to leave him out there in it.

I had spent years making excuses for Eleanor, telling myself she was timid, cowed, a woman who had been worn down by a domineering husband and could not be blamed for her smallness.

Standing in that hallway, I found those excuses had abandoned me completely.

Whatever Eleanor was afraid of, she had been warm and safe while my child was neither, and she had heard him at the door, and she had not opened it.

I have thought hard about the difference between Arthur and Eleanor, because it is a real difference and it matters, even though in the end it changed nothing for Lucas.