“Nothing — he’s okay.

But that’s luck.

That’s not because I protected him.

I handed him to her because I couldn’t stand to look at the box either.” And there it was, said out loud between us for the first time in thirty years: the box, and what was in it, and the fact that we had both been quietly feeding our own children to the same climate we had barely survived, because facing it was harder than risking them.

It is a terrible thing to love your children and still find the truth about your mother more than you can carry.

We had both done it.