“Then your mother,” I said, “should have used forty-eight thousand dollars of her own money.”

Julian lowered his voice into the register I knew so well, the one he deployed whenever he wanted to make me feel that I was the unreasonable one, that my entirely justified position was a kind of hysteria he was patiently enduring.

“Evelyn.

You are behaving emotionally.

You need to reverse this, before you damage relationships that could affect both of us.”

It was a masterful little sentence, and once it would have worked on me.