She recited the cruelest things Gavin had said to her the way a person reads a grocery list, drained of feeling, and I understood that this was what months of it had done, that she had heard without me, that a person could only survive being told they were garbage by a certain number of times before some protective part of them went numb to it.

I felt the anger rise hot in my chest, and I made myself set it aside, the way you set aside a weight you cannot afford to be carrying yet, because I knew that anger was not what was going to help her.

Evidence was.

And that was the one thing we were now in a position to gather.

I have known a great many angry people in my life, and I have learned that anger, for all its heat, is remarkably useless in a crisis, and worse than useless when the person you are angry at is watching for exactly that reaction.

Gavin would have known precisely how to use my rage against me; he had been using my mother’s fear against her for months, and rage and fear are cousins, both of them the emotions of a person who has lost their footing.