She had not set out to kill me.
In her own broken accounting, she had wanted to shrink me — to make me weak enough that I would recede, work less, need help, so that the household would tilt back toward her and her son would look to his mother again.
It was the logic of a woman who had come to see love as a fixed quantity, a pie with a limited number of slices, so that every piece of Lucien’s love that went to me was a piece stolen from her.
She hadn’t wanted me dead.
She’d wanted me diminished, so there’d be more of him left over for her.
And that petty, human, almost ordinary jealousy — the mother who can’t let go of the son — was the exact soft material that Malachi Braddock had found and shaped into something lethal.