He had given her chance after chance, had coached Chloe on how to win her over, had kept believing, against a mountain of evidence, that Beatrice was capable of change.

Somewhere in the last year, I now realized, he had stopped believing it.

He had looked clearly at his mother, at the three-year pattern of small deliberate cruelties, and he had finally accepted the thing it costs a person so much to accept about a parent: that she was who she was, and that no amount of hoping was going to make her love his daughter.

And having accepted it, he had made a decision.