I have had to sit with that revelation for a long time, and it has changed, retroactively, my entire understanding of my childhood.

I grew up believing certain things about my mother that I now know were the deliberate surface she constructed to protect us.

I thought she had no family because she was somehow alone in the world; in fact she had walked away from a family and a fortune on purpose.

I thought we were poor because that was simply our lot; in fact she had chosen a smaller life, given up wealth that was rightfully hers, so that we would be beneath the notice of dangerous people.

Every hard thing about our early years, every budget stretched thin, every want gone without, I had understood as bad luck or as the ordinary difficulty of a single mother getting by.