Alexis shook her head fiercely. “She already has two amazing grandmothers. Kathleen and Eric’s mom. We’ll see when she gets older how we’ll talk about it.”

“And we’re lucky,” Eric said. “Juliet already goes to school with a lot of kids who come from interracial families. Families that look like ours. I hate saying that it’s likely a lot of those families have had to cut someone out of their lives because of their racism or bigotry. But…” His lips pressed into a thin line. “It is likely. My hope would be that we can all help each other figure out how to have those conversations about race and family together.”

I nodded vigorously. “That happened at the Lavender Center for a lot of gay and queer families who went there. They supported each other through a lot of conversations that were difficult to have.”

The relationship we had with my mom when Alexis was a senior in college was strained at best. Early on, she’d made it clear that her new family made a lot of demands on her time. And she and my dad weren’t amicable anyway.

We rarely saw her and—quite honestly—preferred it that way. After years of being subjected to her criticism—and, for me, her manipulative lying—Alexis and I were much, much happier being out from under her thumb.

We weren’t even trying to salvage the relationship as much as we were fine keeping it as it was. I still kept trying to convince my mother that my bisexuality was real and valid out of a desperate attempt to make her a better person. Every attempt at that failed, leaving me heartbroken and hurt while my dad and sister were furious.

And then Alexis started dating Eric. He was right—as soon as things got serious between the two of them and she started bringing him over for family dinners and movie nights, their true love was on full display. By that point, our relationship with our mother had dwindled to a passing text or email, but she somehow saw a picture of the two of them on social media.

We never knew exactly what my mom said to my dad when she called him about it, but he distilled it for us to the pertinent points—her daughters had disappointed her often throughout her life, but things had reached a crisis point for her now that one daughter was bisexual and the other was dating a Black man. Honestly, at that point, there wasn’t even really a relationship there to cut off.

All of us cut her off anyway.