“I used to smoke. Did you know that?” she told me back when I was Peyton’s age and asking pushy questions. All I knew about my dad was that he was in prison. She wouldn’t tell me what state, much less the facility. I hadn’t yet connected this information to her nerves, her deep mistrust, her many calls to the police about noises on the roof or at the windows. In my aggrieved adolescent imagination, my father yearned to know me. He probably wrote me long, hopeful letters from his cell. Letters that my mother kept from me, unjustly, the same way she made me keep a chore chart and a ridiculous sunset curfew.

“I don’t see what smoking has to do with it,” I told her, snotty-voiced, one insolent hip cocked at an angle my elder daughter would reinvent and throw at me before her age hit double digits.

My mother shrugged. “A pack a day, for years, right up until the test said I was pregnant. I knew that smoking killed people. It said so right on the package. I’d heard of lung cancer, emphysema. Still, I couldn’t stop. Smoking only hurt me, and I was used to being hurt. My husband made sure of that.”

Her gaze was so serious, her words so calm. She talked to me like I was a person. Not her kid. Like I was some adult she’d met on the bus, and she was telling me some factual information. It made my eyes ache and my mouth go dry.

“He hurt you?” I asked.