I will not pretend I was made of stone.

There were nights the weight of it came down on me all at once, and I went under.

One of those nights, near the end of a long stretch when my husband had been away and my son had been sick and Fiona had not slept and neither had I, something in me simply gave out.

I was sitting on the edge of her bed in the small hours, and I put my face in my hands, and I cried — really cried, the ugly exhausted kind — and before I could stop myself the words came out of me.

“Mom,” I said, because I had long since started calling her that, “I’m only your daughter-in-law.