That was the sentence that told me she would never, in her whole life, understand what she had done.

Not I’m sorry. Not what have I done. Not even a serviceable lie about being overwhelmed or unwell.

Her instinct, cornered, with her nephew hours out of respiratory danger and her daughter being taken into protective custody, was to argue the degree — to insist that he hadn’t been dying, as though there were a line short of death below which what she’d done didn’t count, as though he only nearly stopped breathing were a defense.

In that instant I stopped hoping for any remorse from her, then or ever, because remorse requires you to see the person you harmed as a person, and Sondra had never once, in any of this, seen either child as anything but an object that was either quiet or too loud, functioning correctly or malfunctioning.

She was not sorry Rhys had nearly died.

She was irritated that I was making it a bigger deal than the outcome, in her accounting, strictly required.