I was wrong, Evelyn.” She squeezed my fingers.

“Being a family means protecting the people who love you.

And it means knowing when to close the door on the ones who don’t.” I have carried that sentence with me ever since, because it was hard-won, and because it corrected a lie that a great many good people spend their whole lives believing.

My mother had believed, for sixty-two years, that family was a thing you owed everything to, unconditionally, that blood obligated endless endurance, that a good woman kept the door open no matter who walked through it or what they did once inside.

It had nearly destroyed her.