And he had finally understood that the idea, taken as an absolute, is a trap — that it asks the wronged to keep offering themselves to the person wronging them, in the name of a bond the wrongdoer has already broken.

He did not hate his mother.

He had made his peace, in a hard clear-eyed way, with who she was.

But making peace with who someone is does not require putting yourself back within their reach, and honoring the fact of a relationship does not obligate you to pretend the relationship is something it never was.

Junia had chosen, over and over, control over connection, image over love, domination over the actual family that had been available to her the whole time.

She had chosen it so thoroughly that she had thrown out her own grandchild to preserve it.