I will not reproduce it word for word, but its substance is burned into my memory.

She informed me, as a matter of settled fact, that she would be attending our daughter’s wedding.

She did not ask.

She framed it, instead, around herself: how would it look, she wrote, in front of her new family, if she were to skip an event like her own daughter’s wedding?

And she closed by instructing me, in the tone of a woman managing a difficult subordinate, that she expected no drama from me.

I read it twice, standing there, because the first time through I could not quite believe the arrangement of it.