It was older than that, and stranger, and harder to name.

I was grieving a mother who, I slowly understood, had perhaps never fully existed at all.

Because when I searched my memory for the woman who made hot chocolate on snow days and braided my hair, I could find her, but I could also, now, see through her, see that even in those tender moments there had been something else running underneath, the same self-interest, the same calculation, that had ended with a smartphone held over my bleeding body.

The tenderness had been real, in its way, but it had never been the whole truth of her, only the face she wore when tenderness cost her nothing.