The voice on that phone was not like that.

It was calm the way a machine is calm, unhurried, without heat or hatred, discussing my son’s life in the register you’d use to reschedule a delivery. A clean exit. That was when I understood that Lachlan, the man who had loomed over my whole adult life, was not actually the danger — he was a middleman, a frightened one, caught between me and something far larger and colder than himself.

The people that voice belonged to did not care about my son or me as people at all.

We were a variable in a business problem, an exposure to be closed.

And there was, strangely, a kind of clarity in that.

You cannot appeal to a machine’s mercy, so you stop wasting energy looking for it.