And in that moment he finally understood the shape of the thing that had run his whole life, because she had just said it out loud without meaning to. You stopped obeying me. That was the crime Marlowe had actually committed, in Junia’s eyes — not infidelity, which Junia knew perfectly well was invented, but influence.

Marlowe had given Desmond something Junia could not control: a partner, a separate loyalty, a reason to become his own man rather than his mother’s permanent child.

For thirty years Junia had been a school principal, running rooms full of children who had to do as they were told, and she had run her son the same way, and the entire architecture of her life depended on him staying small enough to be run.

A capable daughter-in-law was not a threat to Desmond.

She was a threat to Junia — to the arrangement in which Desmond’s inadequacy kept him tethered, in which his mother remained the most important person in his world because no one else was permitted to matter.

So Junia had done what threatened tyrants always do: she had destroyed the rival and called it protection.