Can you imagine anything more sordid, my friend said. Your daughter making a play for your boyfriend. And right under your nose too. And he was so flattered, the fool. I had to ban him from our lives before the unspeakable happened. I even threatened him with the police. And once he was gone she forgot all about him. It wasn’t as if she’d really cared, of course. She wasn’t some helpless innocent. All she’d wanted was to hurt me. And she wanted as many people as possible to know about it too, so I’d have to suffer the greatest possible humiliation.

That’s when she understood how much her own child hated her, my friend said.

She had never got over it. A stain on her life that could never be washed out, she described it. A sorrow that could arise unexpectedly at any moment, and that did seem to arise at particularly happy or peaceful moments, she said—to ruin them.

I’d be having a perfectly good day, going about my business, when suddenly for no clear reason the memory of it all would come back, and I’d be forced to relive it. I learned that I could get past it by burying myself in my work, but there were times when it was enough to sink me into a depression for days.

But didn’t they ever try to talk about it? I asked. I meant when her daughter had grown older.

They did, she said. And got absolutely nowhere.

Her daughter’s memory of the incident was quite different. In her view, she was hardly the guilty one. She was just a kid, after all. It was the man’s fault, she said. He was a creep, but her mother had been too infatuated to see it. She had only herself to blame for bringing a guy like that into their lives in the first place.

Much later, she would say that her mother had overreacted. If it had been as big a deal as her mother seemed to think, surely it would have stayed with her, the daughter said. But in fact she couldn’t recall which of her mother’s boyfriends they were even talking about. And later still, she insisted that her mother had misremembered everything. Between her and this guy, whoever he was, nothing had happened.

You want to forgive all, my friend said, and you should forgive all. But you discover that some things you can’t forgive, not even when you know you’re dying. And then that becomes its own open wound, she said: the inability to forgive.

V

Have you noticed, she said. Her face has changed.

She was talking about the portrait in the living room. We had grown more than used to it. No longer an eyesore, it had become a mysteriously comforting presence. She seemed to be watching over us, we agreed.

Like a spirit, my friend said.