And that is the particular cruelty of being betrayed by a parent: it does not only break your present, it reaches backward and poisons your past, forcing you to re-examine every warm memory for the rot you were too young to see, to wonder which of the moments you had treasured were genuine and which were merely convenient.

I would never fully know.

That was part of what I had to grieve, there in the courtroom: not just the mother I had lost, but the certainty that I had ever really had her, the simple childhood faith that the woman who braided my hair had loved me without condition or calculation.

Maybe she had, sometimes.

Maybe the love and the greed had lived in her side by side, and the greed had simply, in the end, been stronger.

I will never know, and I have made a kind of peace with not knowing.