You cannot mourn a thing you never knew you had.

And Arthur had never once, in his whole life, known that he had a mother who loved him and was waiting, right up until the end, for him to walk through the door.

He inherited nothing from her death because he had already thrown away, unknowing, the only inheritance that was ever real.

I did not hate him for it.

I was beginning, even then, to feel something else toward him entirely, something closer to pity, though I would not fully understand that until later.