“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked her that night, when we were finally somewhere safe and quiet and she could talk.

It was the question that had been burning in me since the patio.

“Mom.

Two years.

Why didn’t you say one word?”

She wiped her face with the back of her wrist, an old gesture I remembered from my childhood, and when she answered, her voice was so small it broke my heart in half.

“They told me,” she said, “that if I bothered you with it, you might sell the house.

They said you had worked so hard for it, and that if you found out there was trouble, you would just get rid of it and I would have nowhere to go.