I learned things I had been too busy being wounded to know — that she hadn’t been criticizing my leaving so much as terrified by it, that she’d watched me go somewhere she couldn’t protect me and had no language for the fear except the language of you think you’re too good for us, which was the only way her own mother had ever expressed fear to her.

I learned she’d been proud of me the whole time and had not known how to say it without it sounding like surprise.

And she learned the thing I’d been hiding, the four hundred dollars and the couches and the sums under the nice coat, and instead of I told you so she cried again and said she wished I’d told her, that she couldn’t have sent much but she could have sent something, that a mother would rather know her child is struggling than be protected from it by a year of ten-minute phone calls.

We had both, it turned out, been doing the same thing from opposite ends — each protecting the other from a truth, each reading the protection as distance, each too proud to be the first to say the frightened thing out loud.