Ten years later, in that living room, he explained it, and it made a terrible kind of sense.

But I have never fully reckoned with my mother’s part, the standing there, the weeping, the not moving.

She has never fully explained it, and I have never quite found the way to ask.

Perhaps she was as frightened as he was, and did not know it.

Perhaps she thought he had a plan and trusted it.

Perhaps she simply froze, the way people do, in the presence of a catastrophe too large to interrupt.

I have decided, for my own peace, to believe the most forgiving version, because she is my mother and I have her back now and I do not want to spend the years we have left holding a screen door against her.