But I understood something, watching her face collapse, that took some of the old sting out of all her years of cruelty: she had not been defending a good man from an unworthy woman.

She had been, without knowing it, deceived by her own son as completely as I had been, and her cruelty toward me had been, in part, the stray energy of a woman protecting a lie she did not know was a lie.

It did not make her innocent.

But it made her, at last, comprehensible, and something in me let go of her, in that moment, and has never picked her back up.

Chapter 12 — No Petty Triumph