And now Radley had just told her, casually, flicking dust off his sleeve, that his plan for Percy was to abandon him — to leave him behind like unwanted furniture with an old man he was busy robbing, while he fled the country with his mistress.

In that instant the entire architecture of her imprisonment collapsed, because it had never actually been about protecting Percy at all.

She had been protecting Percy from nothing, guarding a guilt that was manufactured, enduring the dark to keep her son safe from a man who intended to throw her son away.

The love that had been her chain became, in one sentence, the thing that broke it.

A mother who will accept any suffering to protect her child becomes something else entirely the moment she realizes the suffering was never protecting the child.

She had gone into that gatehouse a terrified girl convinced she was a murderer.