The absence itself — the thing Gideon meant to hang me with — was the shape my love took, the sacrifice a mother makes when the money has to come from somewhere and the somewhere is her own body and her own sleep.

And Gideon had looked at all of that devotion, catalogued it, and figured out how to reframe it, on paper, for a judge, as its own opposite.

Love as neglect.

Provision as abandonment.

The mother who works nights recast as the mother who’s never there.

It is a specific kind of evil, that — not the hot, impulsive kind, but the cold, clerical kind that takes the best thing about a person and files it as the worst.

And what made it almost unbearable was knowing how often it works.