It will not send a school photograph.

It will not know you on the street.

You can be completely, unimpeachably right, and die of it, alone, in a kitchen, having won every argument and lost every person, and the rightness will be no comfort at all, because rightness was never what you actually wanted.

What you wanted was the person.

Enid had traded a daughter for the grim satisfaction of being owed an apology, and she had held that trade for nineteen years out of a pride she could see clearly now only because it had cost her everything it could cost, and she was trying, with the bluntness that was the only tenderness she had, to keep me from making the same trade at a discount.

She reached over and, for the first time ever, put her hand on mine.