“I wasn’t angry that you left,” he said, and this was the thing that undid me.

“I was angry that leaving worked out for you.

That you got to be free and I got to be here, and that seemed like the whole story, and it made me small, being that angry, and I knew it, and I couldn’t stop.

If you’d told me what she said — I’d have understood.

I might even have gone with you.

I stayed because I thought one of us had to, and I thought you’d decided it wasn’t going to be you.” Two people, I understood, sitting on that cold step — two people who had each spent nine years believing they were the one abandoned, each nursing a version of the other that was easier to resent than to grieve, both of us wrong and both of us right, neither of us a villain, only two children of the same hard, loving, complicated woman, trying in our separate wrong ways to survive her.