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 when Dr.

Okonkwo asked me to say, with certainty, that my staying would have stopped him, I could not, because it was not true.

A man determined to control and harm his wife does not abandon the project because his mother is in the next county.

He hides it better.

Perhaps my staying would have helped; perhaps I would have seen more, sooner.

But perhaps he would simply have added me to the list of people to be managed and deceived, another witness to be worked around, the way he worked around the trucker and the whole state of Nebraska.