“Are you out of your mind? You want my mother to p…

But a golden retriever does not corner you in your own kitchen with a shopping list and a smile that never quite reaches its eyes. Patricia, never Pat, never Patty, always Patricia, was sixty-three years old and recently retired from a twenty-year career in insurance. She was not poor.

She had a pension, a paid-off condo twenty minutes from our house, a reliable sedan, and a savings account she mentioned just often enough to remind you it existed. She was also not generous, despite the way she sometimes talked about herself. “I’ve always given everything to this family,” she would say, usually after asking for something.

“After everything I’ve done for you both,” she would add, usually when she had not gotten what she wanted. I had been hearing variations of those two phrases for six years, and I had responded to all of them the same way: with patience, with flexibility, with the quiet tolerance of a woman who had decided that keeping the peace was worth more than being right. I was wrong about that.

I was deeply, expensively, humiliatingly wrong. Our house, my house technically, though I had never made a point of saying so, was a three-bedroom craftsman on a tree-lined street that I had purchased two years before I met Daniel. I had saved for six years for that down payment, eating lunches at my desk, skipping vacations, saying no to things I wanted until I could say yes to the thing I needed most.