Each comparison sharpened her awareness of her own exclusion, though she could never explain why it was happening. Her mother noticed, slipping her knowing glances across the dinner table, sometimes nudging her husband with a gentle remark: “Don’t be so hard on her.”
But his only reply was silence, or a grunt, or a glance toward the attic door as though retreating into his own fortress of memory. For Miriam, the feeling was unavoidable: she was becoming a problem in his eyes, though she didn’t know what she had done to earn it.