Nadia is thirty four and she still checks her tone before she answers her mother's calls.

Nothing has ever happened that she could describe. There is no incident. When she tries to explain it to her husband she hears how thin it sounds, so she stops explaining it.

What actually happens is this. Her mother asks about her job in a way that is not a question. Her mother mentions her cousin's house. Her mother says, laughing, that Nadia was always the sensitive one, and her aunt laughs too. Then the call ends warmly and Nadia sits in the car for ten minutes before she can go inside.

She has spent eleven years trying to work out what she is doing wrong in those calls. That is the wrong question, and lesson two is about why.