“She’s my daughter—”

“And he’s my son, and I would sell him where he sits.” Wendy was gray in the face and her hands were shaking in her lap.

“Don’t you dare come into this woman’s house and make your girl a child.

She sat at that table.

She ate that food.”

And then there were eleven minutes in my living room that I have chosen not to write down in detail, in which two siblings in their sixties said things to each other that had been waiting forty years, and Patricia cried, and Arthur kept one hand on his wife’s wrist and one eye on her color, and my husband said nothing at all.

By eleven o’clock they had gone.