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

I was not going to be the one who removed it.

That is not the failure of a mother’s love.

As near as I have ever been able to tell, it is the whole of it.

Chapter 14 — Tearing It Down

Natasha and I went back to the ranch together that December, and at the gate she stopped, frozen by what the place held.

I told her we could leave and never come back, that she never had to set foot in that house again.

She stood looking at the empty corrals and the weathered house for a long moment.