I had braced for cruelty.

What I had not braced for was the sincerity.

My mother was not a woman performing a defense she did not believe; she was a woman who had never once, in a long life, entertained the possibility that she had done wrong.

She believed, all the way down, that a body was a thing to be governed and that a child’s body was hers to govern, and that the pain she had inflicted was the cost of a lesson the world would otherwise have taught more harshly.

She thought she had been kind.

That was the horror of it, sitting across the tea from her: not that she knew what she had done and hid it, but that she did not experience it as a thing to hide at all.