What I will say is what it did to me to read them, sitting alone at my kitchen table at midnight with the tablet glowing in the dark.

It was not rage, at first.

It was a kind of vertigo, the floor going soft, as years of small slights I’d explained away suddenly clicked into a single clear pattern.

Every cool welcome, every joke at my mother’s expense, every time my kids were left out of a photograph — none of it had been my imagination or my insecurity, the things Lindsay had always gently suggested they were.

It had been exactly what it looked like.

These people had decided, before they ever knew us, that my children were lesser because of where I came from and what I looked like, and they had said so to each other, in writing, for years, while smiling at us across the holiday table.