Why my mother had been cold to me in a way she never was to Brigitte.

Why I had spent a childhood certain I had done something wrong, some original sin I could never name or fix.

I had thought it was me.

It had never been me.

I was the living reminder of a thing my mother wanted hidden — the child of the man she chose, raised under the roof of the man she betrayed — and every time she looked at me she saw the whole tangle of her own buried life.

Her coldness had been about her, not me.