She paused at my dumbfounded stare, patting me on the leg again, like, Welcome to the conversation. One of the crows twitched its head at us, cawing starkly and fixing us with a beady eye, as though it took a special interest in fraught family affairs. I tried to remember what two crows meant as an omen; something transformative and good, from what I recalled. Which, nuts to that.

“You . . . knew?” I managed, feeling like the tectonic plates of reality were being reshuffled under my feet. “About Gareth? Gareth and me?”

“Not the particulars, obviously. But that something had happened between the two of you, something rather significant? Of course I did, how could I not?” She gave a wry laugh into her mug, muffled by the china. “You managed to slip his name into conversation what, several hundred times over dinner that summer, all twinkly eyes and innocence. I’m not so decrepit I can’t still recognize the telltale signs of the hopelessly enamored, you know.”

I sat with that for a moment, stomach bunched up like a dirty rag, utterly at sea.

“But you never said anything,” I finally said. “You never mentioned him, after, you never—”

She shot me a severe look, tinged with hurt and accusation. “Because you didn’t choose to tell me about him, my darling, and you were old enough that it wasn’t right to pry. But it changed you, didn’t it? He changed you. Damaged you, somehow. You were happy here with us, before. And then . . .”

She shook her head, and I realized with yet more noxious twisting of my gut that she was struggling for composure. My mother was not, by definition, a crier; the opposite, if anything, more of a stalwart stoic, devoted to her dignity and the nearly sacred concept of bucking up. But there was no mistaking the glistening in her eyes, the trembling corners of her lips.

As rarely as I’d seen it growing up, I still knew what my mother looked like when she was doing her very utmost not to cry.

“And then you could scarcely wait to get away from here,” she whispered, reaching up to dash angrily at her eyes with her knuckles. I recognized the gesture, the irritable impatience with her own emotions, as yet another thing I’d inherited from her. “Away from us. I thought you simply needed space, at first, that nagging at you would only make it worse. But if I’d had any idea that you wouldn’t come back to us . . .”

“You could have visited,” I whispered, though I knew even as I said it that it was not just a miserable cop-out, but a flat-out lie.

She turned to look at me head-on, wet green eyes glittering like peridot, lifting one hand to rest it against my cheek.

“You know we’d never have done that,” she said, with a terrible, quiet kindness. “Not when you made it so clear that you didn’t want us there. Your father and I . . . No matter how terribly we missed you, we’d never have wanted to foist ourselves on you if the feeling wasn’t mutual.”