And she had done it, I would learn, out of the purest and most misguided love.

I have had to forgive my mother for those two years of lies, and it was, strangely, one of the harder parts of all of it, harder than forgiving Julian and Chloe, whom I do not intend to forgive at all.

Because a part of me was angry at her, at first, in a way I was ashamed of.

If she had only told me, I kept thinking, I could have ended it in a week, from anywhere in the world, with a single phone call.

Two years of her suffering could have been two days.