I have had to hold two true things at once about her.

The first is that she was, herself, a person shaped and diminished by forty years with a domineering man, and that this deserves compassion.

The second is that none of that changed her obligation, in the moment that mattered, to a nine-year-old at the door.

Adults do not get to hand their own woundedness to a child to carry.

Eleanor’s fear was real, and it was also not Lucas’s problem, and when the two came into conflict at that locked door, she chose to protect herself from Arthur’s anger rather than to protect her grandson from the storm, and a child nearly died of it.

I can pity her and still say, without wavering, that she made the wrong choice, and that the wrongness of it is not diminished by the sympathy I feel for how she came to be a person who would make it.