It was a tactic — a move Samantha was making against her, a ploy to trap her son, to pull me back from the clean new life my mother had chosen for me.

My mother could not hold in her head the simple human possibility that a woman might come to a doorstep in the rain because she was pregnant and frightened and alone and wanted the father to know.

That version required Samantha to be a person.

And my mother had spent so many years turning Samantha into a villain in the story of my life that a real, suffering woman on the porch simply did not fit the cast list.

So she read the pregnancy as an attack, and defended against it, and called the defense love.

That is what control does to love over time.