I only knew that the mother I was visiting was smaller than the mother I had known, quieter, more careful, as though she were slowly being turned down like a light on a dial, and that the hand on the dial was Gavin’s.

Chapter 5 — Permission to Speak

The evening it all came into focus for me, I had gone over to their house for dinner.

It should have been an ordinary family meal.

Instead I spent it watching something that made the old cold competence stir awake in me for the first time in years.

Every single time my mother wanted to join the conversation, she looked at Gavin first.

Not in the ordinary way that couples glance at each other.