“‘This is Diana—our family dropout,’ my mother said for the fifteenth Thanksgiving in a row, but when my sister’s new husband reached across the table to shake my hand, his grip locked, his face went still, and the room forgot how to laugh before he said the two words nobody there was prepared to hear”

tablet.”

I was quiet for a moment.

“What did she find?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“Right,” I said.

“That seems to have been the point,” he said.

He was not wrong.

My mother had spent 22 years as a practicing attorney, long enough to understand that what doesn’t exist publicly is not nothing. It’s a category of something. A deliberate absence in the record means continue reading …