Sometimes a mother is forcibly kept from her family, kept from the babies she loves, and she can only wait, and hope, and pray for a day like this one.” She pressed a hand to her chest.

She was, I will give her this, very good at it.

And she had just, in front of every guest at my daughter’s wedding, told the whole lie, start to finish, out loud.

What struck me, listening to her, was how much she seemed to believe it, or at least how completely she had committed to it.

She did not deliver it like a woman knowingly telling a falsehood; she delivered it like a woman who had told this story to herself so many times that it had become, in some functional sense, her truth.

Forcibly kept from her family.