In the same breath, and with the same hands, she was poisoning me, and had been for ten years, and would go on to tie my daughter to a chair in a freezing chapel that very week.

So it was not that she was incapable of love, or protection, or care.

She loved Esme, genuinely, in whatever ruined way she was capable of.

She simply had a category for people who were family-by-blood and a category for people who were not, and I had lived on the wrong side of that line the entire time, invisible to me, absolute to her.

Esme was blood; Esme must be protected.

I was an obstacle; I must be removed.