My husband had me sentenced to ten years for a two-million-dollar fraud I never committed, and in the courthouse corridor he pulled my grandmother’s ring off my finger and told me to enjoy it. I didn’t argue. I handed a folded piece of paper to the guard.

My mother is Marit Renquist and she is sixty-six and she is the most self-possessed person I have ever met.

She told me who my father was on my eighteenth birthday, in the kitchen of the house I grew up in, in about ninety seconds.

She told me he was married when it happened in 1986, that he had a family, that he had provided for us in a private way and that his condition had always been discretion, and that if I ever contacted him I would be taking money out of my own mother’s hands.

Then she said, “You can carry it or you can be foolish about it,” and got up and put the kettle on, and that was the entire conversation, and we did not speak about it again for twenty years.