“It was always your love that built this house, Nora,” she said.

“I never forgot that.

Not even when it was dark.

I had to leave the room for a moment, after she said that, and stand in the hallway and collect myself, because there is only so much a person can hold at once, and my mother had just handed me more than I could hold standing up.

For six years, working overseas, I had carried a private doubt that I never spoke aloud to anyone, the doubt that gnaws at everyone who leaves in order to provide.

The doubt was this: that in going away to earn the money to buy her security, I had abandoned her; that the house, however generous, was a substitute for the presence I had not given; that my mother, alone in that house, might have felt not cared for but left behind, might have wondered why her daughter had chosen a job on the other side of the world over the ordinary daily nearness of family.