It took losing my son, and saving Natasha, to learn that there is something a mother owes even before that, which is the truth — and that a love which requires you to stay silent while another person is destroyed is not the kind of love worth protecting.

Dr.

Okonkwo’s question stayed with me because it was a kind of trapdoor, and I fell through it in the best way. If you had stayed, can you say with certainty you would have prevented it? I had been living, without quite knowing it, inside the assumption that I could have — that my presence at the ranch would have been a shield, that the whole tragedy hinged on my absence, and that therefore the whole tragedy was, at bottom, my fault.

It is a strangely grandiose form of guilt, when you look at it directly: it assumes I had the power to control another adult’s behavior simply by being nearby, that Brock’s cruelty was a force I personally held in check and released by getting on a plane.