In the ledger of her mind she had provided — a house, meals, clothes, schooling — and provision was, to her, the whole of what a parent owed, and so she stood accused of nothing.

This is the thing I have come to understand about people like my mother, and it is more chilling than any cruelty: they do not experience themselves as cruel.

They experience themselves as reasonable people making necessary choices, and the suffering they cause is always, in their telling, someone else’s fault for being inconvenient.

Paulina Marsden had buried her husband alive and raised his daughters in a house of ice and handed one of them a fabricated death to grieve, and she sat in that courtroom certain she was the wronged party — betrayed by an ungrateful child who had gone poking in a shed that was none of her business.

She would go to prison believing it.

She would die believing it.