I have thought since about why she did it the way she did — why the secrecy, why the years, why she never once sat me down and simply told me.

And I believe I understand it now.

If she had told me while she lived, there would have been a fight — with Delroy, with Lonnie, out in the open, with lawyers and threats and my brother’s family torn down the middle, and my mother in the center of it, old and tired and afraid.

She had lived her whole life keeping the peace in that house, absorbing what was done to her rather than making a scene, and I think she knew her own limits.

What she could not do face-to-face, in the open, against the men who ruled her, she could do in the dark, alone, a little at a time, with a patience that outlasted all of them.