We survive the rest of this from somewhere she can’t reach.” “I let you go down and sleep on a couch on our wedding night because I was too afraid of my own mother to protect my own wife.

That’s the man you married, Elena.

That’s the whole ugly truth of it.” I did not tell him it was all right, because it was not all right.

But I moved my chair around the table and I put my arms around him, and I said the only thing that mattered.

“Then we don’t stay.

We don’t spend one more night under her roof.