People do not usually say, “I hurt you because I wanted to.”

They say they were frightened. They say they were trying to protect someone. They say they did not know what else to do. They say it was complicated. And eventually, if the room is quiet enough and the damage has lasted long enough, somebody says the word love.

Love is a useful word because it can be made to face in two directions.

It can describe tenderness. It can also be used to explain surveillance, control, jealousy, punishment, silence and the long family habit of pretending that pain proves depth. A person can say, “I only did it because I loved you,” and for a moment the grammar puts the wound inside the virtue.

I wanted They Called It Love Anyway to stay inside that moment.

Not to solve it. Not to announce that love is false whenever it causes harm. That would be easy and, more importantly, untrue. People can love someone and still damage them. Families can be loyal and cruel in the same afternoon. A person can remember a hand on her shoulder with gratitude and fear.

The difficulty is not deciding whether love existed. The difficulty is deciding what love is allowed to excuse.

The novel is built through files because files are what remain when a shared story can no longer hold. One person remembers the kitchen. Another remembers the hallway. Somebody remembers the words. Somebody else remembers only the tone. The facts do not cancel one another. They crowd the room.

I am interested in the moment when a person realizes that the family explanation has been designed to keep the family intact, not to tell the truth.

That realization does not make anyone free. It makes them responsible for what they know.

Adam, Cecelia and the people around them protect, fail, want and resent one another. Each person needs the past to mean something survivable. None of them stands outside the human wish to be forgiven without surrendering the story that makes forgiveness possible.

That is why the title matters to me.

They Called It Love Anyway does not mean they were all lying. It means the word survived everything they put inside it.

I have heard people use love to explain why they stayed. I have heard them use it to explain why they left. I have heard it used after betrayal, after violence, after years of silence, after the discovery that two people had not been living in the same version of the marriage.

The word is not weak. It is dangerously strong.

It can keep a person alive. It can also keep a person in place.

What interests me in fiction is the cost of separating the feeling from the permission. A character may still love the person who harmed her and decide that the harm is no longer allowed. That is not contradiction. That is adulthood, and it is much harder than hatred.

Hatred simplifies. Love keeps the evidence.