She was seventy four and midway through chemotherapy when I brought her home with us, into the ground floor guest room opposite the bathroom, because stairs had become impossible for her. I asked Roland first. He was not enthusiastic but he agreed. Then work sent me away for six days, and when the last meeting ended early I drove back on the morning of the sixth instead of the evening.

Crisps trodden into the carpet. Beer bottles across every surface. The television going in my mother’s room, where my husband and his brother had set themselves up because that was where the screen was. He went white when he saw me. Then he told me he had put my mother in the basement, and when I said it was her room, he shouted that it was his room and his house and that he was the man of the house and did not care about anything else. She was asleep on an air mattress on concrete.

The guest I invited to dinner was his father, Ambrose, eighty one, who has never raised his voice at anyone in his life. He arrived, hung his coat, sat down, and asked his son one question. Where do you imagine you will be sleeping when you are seventy four. Then he waited. Roland could not answer it and eventually he cried, and his brother left before the plates were cleared.

We separated in the spring, and not because of that dinner. It was because I finally heard what he had been telling me for nine years about whose house he thought it was.

My mother finished treatment in August and is clear. She lives with me now and has the good room with the window over the garden. Ambrose comes on Thursdays and the two of them do crosswords and complain about the news.

I bought Roland out. There is one name on the deed and I still read it occasionally for no reason.

For years I was a partial owner of my own life and called it compromise. Anyone who has to announce their authority over you has already admitted they were never given it, and I was never required to ask permission to matter.