“‘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”
Michelle Cross had never, in my memory, initiated a conversation she was not prepared to win. She was a woman of positions, not of questions. The fact that she had called to ask for lunch rather than to make a point suggested that something had shifted.
