She had not let herself imagine them, I think.
It is easier to destroy a thing you keep abstract.
For six years the children had been, to her, a scandal — a threat to a stock price, a liability to be managed, a smudge on a name.
Now they were standing in a hallway holding toy cars, small and real and hers, and I believe that was the first instant she understood, in her body rather than her calculations, the actual size of what she had done.
It did not make her repent.
My mother was past repenting; the machinery in her that might have repented had rusted solid decades ago.
But I saw it land, and I was glad, coldly, that it landed.
I wanted her to see them.
I wanted her to carry those four faces for the rest of her life.
“Quadruplets,” I said, and my voice broke on the word.
“Four of them, Mother.
Not one child you told me had been lost.
Four sons.
You didn’t only take the woman I loved and convince me she’d thrown our life away for money.