I did not foreclose. I want that said plainly, because everyone assumes I did. I let the notice stand for nine days and then I withdrew it, and the reason was a fourteen-year-old boy.

Elliott called me on the fourth day from a school office phone because his parents had taken his. He did not ask me to come back or to pay anything. He asked whether I was warm. That was the whole question. It was the first time in five years anyone in that house had asked me something that was not a request.

So I converted the lien into a proper repayment schedule, drafted by my attorney, with a term and a rate and a signature line for each of them. Maurice signed it in a lawyer’s office with his hands shaking. Priscilla signed it without looking at me.

Then I moved out permanently. A one-bedroom apartment on Calloway Street, eleven minutes from Elliott’s school, with a window that catches the afternoon light and a kitchen where nobody irons anything but their own shirts.

They have never missed a payment. Eleven hundred a month for the next twenty-one years, which means Priscilla will be paying her mother until she is sixty-three, and I have made my peace with the fact that she will resent me for every one of those payments.

Elliott comes Thursdays. He is seventeen now and taller than his father and he does his homework at my table and eats everything in my refrigerator. Last month he asked me what Everett was like, and I talked for two hours, and he let me.

Priscilla came once, in February, and stood in my doorway and could not manage an apology. She managed “the tea is still in the cupboard at home,” which I understood to be the closest thing available to her.

I spent five years being told I was being given a roof, while I paid for the roof, the heat, the water, and the food underneath it. What I learned in a supermarket line, at seventy-five, with a box of chamomile tea in my cart, is that nobody can make you invisible without your signature on the paperwork. I finally stopped signing.