What I felt instead, watching her ducked into the back of the cruiser, was closer to the feeling of setting down a heavy thing you have carried so long you stopped noticing its weight — a strange, spreading relief that frightened me a little with how uncomplicated it was.

I understood then that the mother I was supposed to grieve had never actually existed.

I had spent forty years grieving her anyway, mourning a warmth that was never coming, keeping a chair pulled out at the table of my heart for a woman who was never going to sit in it.

And watching the real one, the only one there had ever been, get read her rights beside the rose bushes, I finally let that phantom go.

There was no one to grieve.

There was only Frances, who had done a thing, and the law, which had come for her, and me, who was free.