She stepped quickly out of the pew where she was resting the bags. “Mother, let’s go.” She took hold of her mother’s elbow, began pulling her down the side aisle and out of the cathedral. “I have to go home. I have to go now.” Confused, her mother fumbled for the toy bag and the library books, trying to help. She jerked her mother’s arm, gripping it hard. “Forget it. Let’s just go.”

Sylvia stares now at the traffic signal. “They are fine. But I’m not fine.” Stop, it says. Stop.

Her mother is watching Sylvia with mounting fear, holding her face steady, trying not to betray her own flailing emotions. Is it back? Is it over?

“I have everything,” Sylvia says, her voice breaking into little chunks. The light turns green, and she eases the clutch, turning right onto the road that lies along the river, waving her arm cursorily out the window to signal. “I never thought I would have all this. My beautiful children,” she says. “My husband. I have everything. My house and my writing. I never thought I would have it.”

“But of course you were going to have it, my darling,” Aurelia argues, reassured by what she misreads as a simple overflow of emotion. “Of course you were.”

“No—” Sylvia says. “I wasn’t going to have it. I didn’t think I would ever have it. I was afraid I was going to have nothing.” She pauses, bracing herself for the words her mother has never been willing to hear. “That’s why I broke down. That’s why I tried to kill myself.”

There is a moment of thick, airless silence.

“But that’s over now, Sylvia,” Aurelia finally replies, her words measured and motherly, calmly declarative. “That was so long ago. You put so much pressure on yourself. You didn’t really want to die.”

“What?” Sylvia says, incredulous. “What?” she says, stabbing furious glances in her mother’s direction while watching the road. “Of course I wanted to kill myself! I wanted nothing else but to kill myself.”

Aurelia’s face drains of all color.

“You know I did, Mother. You know I did,” Sylvia says, her voice both pleading and insistent. “That’s why you locked up the knives. That’s why you locked up my sleeping pills.”

“No, Sylvia,” says Aurelia, scrambling, “you didn’t really. You didn’t really want to die. That’s how you gashed your head, that’s why you’ve got this scar—” She reaches toward Sylvia’s temple to brush away her bangs with a finger. But Sylvia’s arm flies reflexively off the steering wheel to block her mother’s touch. Aurelia recoils, stunned; her face begins to melt off its bones. “Sylvia, no,” she insists, her eyes brimming, “you were trying to get up. You were trying to help yourself. You were vomiting up the pills. You were crying. That’s how we found you.”