That was, in some sense, the professional guess.

I have spent twenty years around people who are quietly in trouble, and I know what it looks like when someone in a family starts making unexplained trips.

I assumed my mother-in-law had a problem — a debt, a man, a bad investment, something she was managing behind our backs — and that she was bringing Nell along because a woman with a child in the car does not look like a woman doing anything.

The second thing I thought was worse and I made myself think it anyway, and I want it on the record because I think every parent who has ever heard a version of that sentence goes there and most of them are ashamed of it afterward.