She was eighteen and terrified and holding him like a bomb.

My children called her cousin Chloe, which was not technically accurate in any direction, and which nobody ever corrected.

So when people ask me why I covered my mother-in-law’s eyes in that motel room — and this is the question I get most, from everybody, always — the honest answer has two halves.

The first half is the one I gave at the time, and it is entirely true: Wendy’s blood pressure, twenty-five minutes from a hospital, and I was not going to let that woman’s heart find out that way, standing up, in a room that rents by the hour.

The second half took me almost a year to be able to say.