That’s the whole prize.

That’s what you win.”

I have thought about what she said that night more than about almost anything anyone has ever said to me, because it undid a thing I did not know I believed.

I had grown up understanding conflict the way most people do, as a contest with a right side and a wrong side, and I had spent my life quietly keeping score — who owed whom the apology, who had started it, who was justified.

My distance from my mother was, in my private ledger, justified: she had made me feel small about leaving, she owed me the understanding, and until she offered it I was within my rights to keep my careful ten-minute Sundays.