It does not work that way.

I looked at Sheldon reaching for me across that table, and I loved him exactly as much as I had when he was small and feverish and I sat up all night with him, and it was the love that made it unbearable, not the anger.

If I had stopped loving him it would have been easy.

I could have walked out cold.

But I had not stopped, and so every word of what I was about to say cost me something, and he did not even know it was costing me, because he had never once in his adult life imagined that his mother had an interior he could wound.

That was the whole root of it, I think.