No outbursts, no spectacular confrontations. Just a constant, discreet, exhausting animosity. Margaret was a determined and self-reliant woman, who had run her own business after becoming a widow. Joe, on the other hand, was expansive, laid-back, invasive. Sarah had preferred to see it as a simple incompatibility of personalities.
But a sentence she had heard by chance, seven years after the ceremony, had continued to resonate with her. His mother, looking Joe straight in the eye, said: "You know perfectly well what you've done." * Joe didn't flinch. No words, no gestures. This silence was not that of someone who does not understand.
Words that have remained forever unfinished
Margaret had learned of her illness in November. In March, she passed away. In her very last moments, she had shaken her daughter's hand and whispered, "I want you to know the truth." * The sentence had been interrupted there. The rest never came.
