I kept the forty-seven pages.

Not to hurt anybody. Not to wave at Lauren and Kyle when we argue. I've never once shown them to anyone.

They're in a drawer in Mom's desk, next to her letter, her will, and the crossword she finished in twenty-two minutes on the day she made the video.

I read them once, all the way through, the week after the will.

It was the hardest thing I've ever read.

But there was something else in that pile that I hadn't expected.

In the margins, all the way down, in Mom's loopy blue handwriting, there were little notes. Next to 41, divorced, living in a shoebox, she'd written: She reads to 40 children a week. What do you do, Kyle?

Next to She's only doing it for the house, she'd written: She fixed my furnace at midnight. You were asleep.

Next to She can have the china, she'd written: She can have everything.

Forty-seven pages of the worst things anyone has ever said about me.

And all the way down the side, my mother, quietly defending me. For two years. Where nobody could see.