“Why didn’t you say anything?”

Karen looked at the shrubs.

“I’ve had eighteen years to build an answer to that,” she said. “I’ve got a very good one. Your father was controlling. He had the accounts. I was frightened of him. It’s all true and it’s all real and it is not the reason, and I’d rather not sit here and give it to you, because you’d know.”

“Then what’s the reason?”

My mother turned her coffee cup around on the table.

“I did the arithmetic,” she said. I waited.