He was not undone by his mother’s cunning.

He was undone by the simple recorded fact of what he had done, which he had assumed no one was keeping track of.

Someone had been keeping track.

She had been keeping track the whole time, in her journals, in her heart, with a clarity he had never once credited her with, because it had never occurred to him that the mother he had written off was paying the closest possible attention to everything he did and failed to do.

The truth was the only weapon in the room, and it had always been his own.