A weak, cornered, greedy man does a monstrous thing to save his own skin — it is monstrous, but it runs on a logic I can trace.

My mother was different, and the difference is the thing that has taken me the most years to hold.

Because her crime was not against a wife she had grown to hate, the way Kenneth’s was.

Her crime was against her own daughter, and her own grandsons — the boys whose birthdays she had always attended, whose small hands she had held, who had insisted, that very afternoon, that Grandma should have the first slice of cake.

And she had not done it in a rage, or a panic, or a moment of madness that she might one day plead.