What none of us could have known was how the words would curdle in hindsight, how a house full of the kindest people I knew was about to be told a truth that talk most certainly had helped to bury.

But I do not hold the irony against her.

She spoke the wisdom she had, out of the love she had, to the daughter-in-law she was welcoming into her family for the second time.

That the ground beneath all of us was rotten was not her fault.

She was doing what good people do: choosing, in the face of gossip and doubt, to believe in love and to bless it.

The rot was one man’s doing, not hers, and I have never once let the memory of that blessing be spoiled by what came after.