And Desmond could hold two things at once, which was the whole of his hard-won maturity: that she was his mother and that he loved her in the helpless way you love a parent, and also that he would not spend one more hour inside the reach of a person who had proven, beyond any doubt, what she would do with access to the people he loved.

That was not cruelty.

It was the boundary he should have drawn twenty years earlier, drawn at last, and kept.

When Junia died alone one winter morning, found only days later, Desmond cleared out her few belongings and found a small leather notebook filled with congratulations she had written to herself, signed in the names of colleagues who had never sent them.

He felt a deep sadness for her, and no guilt at all.

She had spent her whole life building an image for strangers, and destroyed every real bond she had trying to protect it.