What happened between you two?”

“Nancy, lower your voice,” Douglas murmured, rubbing his forehead.

“No, Douglas, it’s a legitimate question.” She stepped closer to my chair, and I saw that she was not being cruel so much as frightened — that her fierceness had turned, in her confusion and grief, in the only direction it could find.

But it was pointed at me.

I looked around that wood-paneled room at the faces of my family.

Sixty-nine years of devotion and partnership and I had helped raise these three children, held their father’s hand through pneumonia and two surgeries, sat four months at his hospice bed — and here, now, this was where we stood: my own daughter standing over me demanding to know what shameful thing I must have done to deserve being cast out penniless by the man who had loved me since we were nineteen.