Not that I’d been poisoned, but that I had funded it, monthly, with a check I wrote out of love.
Braddock had understood something about my household that I had been too close to see: that my generosity toward Mireille wasn’t landing as generosity.
To me, the allowance and the specialists and the trips home to Phoenix were gifts, expressions of a daughter’s love for a mother figure.
To her, I would learn from her own letter, every one of them had been a humiliation — proof of how much she needed me, how thoroughly I had replaced her in her son’s life, how completely the balance of power had tipped away from her.
Braddock hadn’t had to invent Mireille’s bitterness.
He’d only had to find it, already there, festering under the smiles, and offer it a way to act.