The text came at 2 a.m. like it was good news—my mother casually told me she’d sold my house while I was away, using an old legal document, and spent the money on my sister’s wedding. When I told her to stop the deal, she laughed—called me selfish, dramatic, ungrateful—and said I could “explain myself” at the family reunion.

My parents belonged to the second category. The fact that they once tucked me into bed does not move them into the first.

When I begin, on rare nights, to wonder whether I have become too hard, too strict, too suspicious of intimacy, I think of Sofia in the mudroom clutching her folder of drawings and asking, Did they find us? I think of Angela’s Christmas card. I think of that white utility van. I think of the sentence my mother chose first after learning she had sold a witness house: Don’t be dramatic. Not Are people safe? Not Tell me what to do. Not Oh God. Her first instinct was to manage my reaction, not her conduct. People reveal their moral center most clearly in the first unscripted seconds after reality arrives.