Loving Your Child Is an Instinct; Shielding Him From the Consequences of What He Did to Another Human Being Is Something Else Entirely — I Learned the Difference at Sixty, at the Door of a Chicken Coop

“And my husband smiled and told him I was insane, and the driver believed him, and drove away while I was screaming.” And Brock, from the table, could not hold himself in.

“Because you were out of control!” he shouted.

And then Natasha did the thing I will remember for the rest of my life.

She turned, slowly, on the stand, until she was facing him directly — the man she had not been able to look at for eight years — and she spoke to him in a voice that did not shake at all.

“I was never insane, Brock,” she said.