I tried, those first couple of years — flew back for a Christmas, sat at that table and watched her pass the potatoes and be, on the surface, sorry, and the whole time the hum was so loud I couldn’t hear the conversation.

She never took it back, not really, not in a way that counted.

She papered over it with ordinary kindness and expected the kindness to do the work that only an apology can do, and it couldn’t, and every visit I left more injured than I’d arrived, bleeding from a wound she seemed to have half-forgotten inflicting.

And at some point I made a choice I’ve never been sure was cowardice or survival, and is probably both: I decided I would rather lose my mother than keep being told, in a thousand small ways, that she wished I’d died instead of my father.

The cost I hadn’t counted was that losing her meant losing you too — because you cannot quietly divorce one person in a family without the silence spreading, and you were collateral in a war you didn’t even know was being fought.