I had, in fact, more than once held Jacqueline up to my sister as the anti-mother, the proof that a maternal figure could be gentle and open and safe, everything ours had not been.

Margot and I had grown up walking on eggshells around a woman whose inner life was a locked room, and here was Zachary’s mother, apparently without a single hidden compartment in her whole soul, apologizing for soap and organizing spices and wearing her small kindnesses right out on the surface where anyone could see them.

I had found her almost restful to be around, precisely because she seemed to have nothing hidden, nothing to decode.

Which makes the morning’s irony even richer, and even more instructive: the one woman I had trusted specifically because she seemed to have no secrets did, in fact, have a secret, and the moment I discovered she had one, I leapt instantly to assuming it was the worst kind, the kind my own mother had kept.