The person underneath it, the one who could stand in an airport and describe her own grandchildren as an unverified legal status, was a stranger, and always had been.

I have tried, since, to make sense of how a person can love you and do this to you in the same lifetime, and the closest I have come is this: my mother did love me, in her way, but her love had always been indistinguishable, even to her, from control.

She did not love me the way you love a person, as a separate being with a life of his own to live and ruin as he chooses.

She loved me the way you love a project, or an estate, or a family name — something to be managed, protected, kept on its proper course, defended against anything that might lower its value.

Rosalind, to my mother, had never been a woman her son loved.

Rosalind had been a variable that threatened the projection, an unsuitable input, a risk to the asset.