This was a woman who had, by her own account, helped end two lives and nearly a third for her son’s sake — and now she meant to hand him to the state.

I do not think it was conscience, or not only conscience.

I think that when the machine finally turned on them, some cold instinct in her did the same arithmetic it had always done, and concluded that the one life still worth saving was her own.

Even her betrayal of Dario was, in the end, self-interest wearing the costume of remorse.

I did not say any of this.