She found her feet and left.

I did not enjoy that, and I want to say why, because it would be easy to write it as a woman getting her satisfying moment against a cruel mother-in-law.

It wasn’t satisfying.

It was sad, in the specific way it is sad to watch someone reach for a tool that has always worked and find it broken in their hand.

The performance of frailty — the trembling, the hand to the heart, the implication that any consequence would be my fault for upsetting a poor old woman — was the oldest instrument in Christina’s kit, and it had worked on me for three years.

It did not work in that lobby, not because I had grown hard, but because I had finally stopped agreeing to the premise.