Neglect is terrible, but neglect is, in a sense, a failure of attention — a caregiver overwhelmed, or absent, or simply not paying enough mind, and a person who suffers as a result.

It is a sin of omission, and omission, however grievous, comes from looking away.

What I was standing in front of was the exact opposite.

That meal chart had not come from looking away.

It had come from looking directly at my mother, and studying her, and thinking carefully about how she worked — about what she needed, and feared, and hungered for — and then engineering a mechanism to use those needs against her.

The neat cursive was the thing that told me.