But Liam’s refusal to even look at me, his willingness to let his mother do his walking-out for him while he studied the floor, told me something about the man I had married that I could feel settling into my body like cold water: he wanted to go, and he did not have the courage to own it, and so he was going to let his mother carry him out the door so that he could tell himself later that it had not been his choice.

That, I would come to understand, was the whole function Brenda served in her son’s life, the deepest reason he could not let her go and would not stand up to her: she was the machine that laundered his choices into things that had happened to him.

As long as his mother was the one physically pulling him toward the door, tugging his arm, doing the talking, Liam could preserve the fiction that he was a good man being managed by a forceful mother, rather than a grown man walking out on his sick child of his own free will.

She gave him deniability.