She had written across a mother’s birth announcement in red ink and mailed it back.

And she had done all of it calmly, over a long stretch of time, with no apparent crisis of conscience, while cooking her son dinner and pouring her own coffee and holding forth at family gatherings about her sacrifices.

It took a particular kind of person to maintain a deception at that level of detail for that long — not a person who had snapped, but a person for whom other human beings were simply obstacles or instruments, to be managed, edited, and disposed of as the image required.

Marlowe had been up against not a jealous mother-in-law’s tantrum but a patient and total campaign to erase her, waged by someone with decades of practice at controlling the narrative of a room.

That she survived it at all, with her daughter and her dignity intact, was the measure of a strength that Junia — who mistook domination for strength her whole life — had never once possessed.

Chapter 9 — Posy