And she had failed, at the deepest level, because there was a part of my mother that no dose could reach, a love that outlasted the fog.

Cruelty is powerful.

It can steal a house, forge a signature, drug a mind, imprison a body.

But there is a floor beneath which it cannot go, a core of a person it cannot quite reach, and in my mother that floor was her love for her children, which survived even the basement.

She never forgot me.

Not because the drugs were weak, but because the love was strong enough to live in a place the drugs could not find.

I rested my head against my mother’s knee, the way I used to when I was a small girl, and I took a deep, full breath of the clean spring air moving through the open windows, and I let myself feel, finally, the full weight of what had happened and what had been saved.