“She’s operated with impunity her whole life,” I said, and felt a strange detachment settle over me.

The woman in the back of that car wasn’t my mother anymore — she was a criminal who had finally run out of road.

I kept waiting, standing on that porch, for the grief to arrive.

She was my mother, after all, and I had read enough and lived enough to know that watching your mother get handcuffed on her own patio is supposed to break something in you, supposed to summon up some buried childhood ache for the parent she might have been.

I waited for it.

It did not come.