They experienced themselves as practical people making hard, responsible choices about a difficult situation, and the fact that the difficult situation was a human being, their own daughter, a person who woke up happy and loved yellow flowers and called her sister every morning, simply never fully registered as real to them.

That is how a person comes to draft a contract to discard their own child and feel, throughout, like a responsible adult.

Not through malice, exactly, but through a failure of imagination so total that another person’s whole inner life becomes invisible to them.

My mother turned and walked to the elevator genuinely not understanding what she had done wrong.

And I understood, watching her go, that this was not a wound I could heal by explaining, because the thing that was missing in her was the very faculty that would have been required to understand the explanation.