She had absorbed all of it, every ounce of the cold and the fear and the betrayal I had supposedly authored, and spent it into raising four kind, funny, unbroken little boys who walked up to strangers with their hands out.
She’d turned my mother’s cruelty into four whole human beings by sheer refusal to be destroyed.
I had spent six years drinking in Paris and calling my numbness strength.
She had spent the same six years actually being strong, without a single day off from it.
“I never sent a lawyer,” I said.
The words came out of me like something breaking.
“I never wrote a note.
I never left you a hundred dollars or a hundred thousand.
Yelena — I never knew where you went.”
Chapter 12 — What I Was Told
She laughed, dry and disbelieving, the laugh of a woman who has been lied to too many times to trust a denial.
“Do you honestly expect me to believe that?”
“Yelena, look at me.” I came right up to the island and gripped the cold stone edge because I needed to hold onto something.
“Six years ago I came home to our apartment and it was empty.