For most of my life I’d have said that feeling nothing about your own mother’s ruin was the coldest thing a person could confess to.

But I had learned, over four years, that indifference is not the opposite of love — hatred is.

Hatred still ties you to a person; it keeps them installed at the center of your life, running your weather, deciding your moods from a distance.

If I had hated Frances, she would still have owned a piece of me, and every foreclosure notice and probation update would have been a hook she could pull.

Indifference was different.

Indifference meant she had finally, fully let go of me, because I had finally, fully let go of her.