At my sister’s wedding reception, my mother demanded I sign over the penthouse my grandmother left me—and when I refused, she slapped me in front of half of Boston. She thought that would finish me. Then my grandmother walked in with a lawyer.

Several months after the wedding, I came home one evening to find Eleanor standing in my living room, her cane leaning against the bookshelf, looking out across the harbor. Boston was lit in winter gold beyond the glass, the city reflected faintly back into the room so that for a moment it seemed as if the skyline floated both outside us and inside. I was barefoot on the oak floor. She wore navy cashmere and pearls. Together we were doubled in the window: two women who had survived the same family by different methods and had, at last, begun speaking the same language about it.

“You know,” she said without turning, “your mother still believes the worst thing that happened that night was the embarrassment.”

“What was the worst thing?” I asked.

She looked at me then, with that dry, unsentimental love that had saved me more times than either of us would ever narrate aloud.

“She learned you were never the weak one.”