A knife tells you only that someone outside you wishes you harm.

It is almost simple, in its way, almost clean.

What Juliet had handed me was the far worse knowledge that the harm had already been done, slowly, over years, by my own hand to my own life — that I had taken a self capable of sitting with a frightened mother and had spent fifteen years filing it down into something that could sign checks and order men about and feel, at the end of the day, almost nothing at all.

My mother sat between us, watching, saying nothing, letting it land.