I have gone over it a thousand times, looking for the moment I should have known, and the terrible thing is that there wasn’t one.

That is how it works, I’ve come to understand, and it is worth saying plainly, because I was not a fool and I was not uncaring, and it happened anyway.

Nobody kept me out with a single outrageous act I could have named and fought.

They kept me out with a hundred reasonable ones.

Each message asked for so little — a rain check, a next-time, a small allowance for a family in pain — that to refuse it would have made me the villain, the pushy relative who couldn’t respect a grieving mother, who put his own need to visit over what the children supposedly needed.

And so my own decency was turned into the lock on the door.