She had driven thirty miles to appointments.

She had come the morning the truck battery died.

She had, somewhere inside the year of locks and stories, believed a version of herself in which all of it was love — in which control and care were the same thing, and a child who could not get free was a child kept safe.

That was the part that took me the longest to understand and the longest to forgive, not her but the situation, the terrible ordinary way that a person can do a cruel thing every single day while telling herself, and half believing, that she is the only one willing to do the hard, unloved work of protecting you.

Two keys on a table ended her authority over my body and over the story of my body.

They did not end the fact that I had loved her, and that she had, in her bent and damaging way, loved me.