My whole life I had wanted my mother to be braver.

It turned out she had been the bravest person in the house the entire time, and the only one who never once let me see it.

I think about the cost of that to her — not just the risk, but the loneliness of it.

For twenty years she carried a secret that would have detonated her family if it slipped, and she carried it without a single confidant, because the only people she might have told were the ones it was aimed at.

She sat across the table from Delroy at supper knowing what she knew.