Freya pressed play. Grandma’s voice rose from the phone into the silent yard, unmistakable and cold. “That boy isn’t ours, not really. Your mother took him in, and I don’t want him at my table like he’s blood. He isn’t.” Forks stopped moving. My brother finally turned from the grill. My sister set down her phone. Everyone had spent years excusing Grandma’s little comments, and now they were hearing, in her own voice, exactly what those comments had always meant.

Elliot’s small hand went still inside mine. I felt him understand, in real time, what his great-grandmother thought of him. But Freya was not done. She looked around at the aunts and uncles who had said nothing for years and told them, “She’s said it to me three times. She wanted me to help push him out. She picked me because she thought I was too quiet to say no.” Then she turned to her grandmother and delivered the sentence that broke the whole table open.