And I tore open the clasp.

Chapter 10 — The Gray Folder

Inside the gray folder was the architecture of my mother’s control, laid out with the cold thoroughness she brought to everything she did.

There was a private investigator’s report.

There were surveillance photographs — long-lens photographs of Rosalind walking two small boys to a preschool, of the three of them at a bus stop, of my sons whose names I had known for four minutes.

There were copies of their daily schedules, their routines, the ordinary movements of two five-year-olds’ lives, documented like the patterns of a target.