What sounded to Julia like overcompensation was in fact just who Mark was; he was playing by the only rules he knew, rules reliant on the expectation that parents cared where their children were living, wanted to hold their grandbabies and know the origins of their nicknames, rules that expected a certain amount of reciprocity and were built on the salient foundation of love itself. He wasn’t aware that she and her mother were playing an entirely different game, one whose rules had never been written down and had also been known to change at will.
