Ansel had spent his entire life as Wilhelmina’s instrument.

I understood, hearing him describe that conversation, that his passivity toward me had never really been about me at all; it had been the same passivity he showed his mother, the same lifelong inability to hold a line against her, pointed in my direction because I was the safer person to fail.

He had betrayed me for two years not out of malice but out of a cowardice so total that he could not refuse his mother anything, including the sacrifice of his own wife.

And now, finally, too late, he had refused her.

He had chosen a self of his own over the son she had built him into.

I could see what it cost him, and I could even respect it.