My mother had not merely been cruel; she had chosen, over and over, to reach for her phone and record the cruelty — to preserve it, to enjoy it twice, to build a library of my family’s degradation that she could return to at leisure.

Cruelty in a hot moment is one thing; a person can lose themselves to rage and be, in some small way, forgiven for it.

This was the opposite of a hot moment.

This was cold, patient, curatorial.

She had filmed my wife scrubbing a floor the way you might film a birthday, because it pleased her, because the power pleased her, and she had kept every clip locked in a drawer with a little key as both a trophy and a weapon — a trophy for the private pleasure of it, and a weapon to be turned on Aurora the instant Aurora thought of telling me.

I sat in front of that laptop and understood that I had not been living with a difficult mother who sometimes went too far.