“That boy,” she said, coming up one slow step, “is the only thing I have ever had.

I lost everything else.

His father was going to take him to Europe and turn him against me, so his father fell down a staircase very like this one, and I have never lost a night’s sleep over it.

The girls, the friends — I moved every one of them out of his life, because none of them understood that he is mine.

I made him.

And you—” she looked at me, and her voice did not rise, which was the most frightening part, “—you are a temporary problem.