He sat on the floor of that rented room for a long time with the notebook in his hands, and what he felt was not triumph and not even anger, but a vast, quiet pity that surprised him with its depth.

Because the notebook explained her, finally, more completely than any confrontation ever had.

A woman who writes herself congratulatory notes in the invented hands of colleagues who never bothered — who needs so badly to be admired that she manufactures the admiration in private, and keeps it, and rereads it — that is not a powerful person.

That is one of the loneliest people who has ever lived.

Junia had spent her entire existence terrified that she was not enough, exactly the terror she had spent decades installing in her son, and she had tried to fill the hole with control, with reputation, with the appearance of a family that revered her.

And it had never worked, because it never can; the admiration you extract or fabricate does not nourish, and so you need more, and more, and eventually you are cropping photographs and forging confessions and destroying your own son’s marriage rather than face the emptiness at the center of you.